When I was younger, my dad used to make what we called a “kitchen sink salad” … it had everything from diced apples and raisins to nuts… oh, and some veggies too. I guess I still have a tendency to empty the refrigerator into my dishes. I’m sure you can imagine the scene… remove the wrap and wonder when we cooked it, sniff and if it don’t smell bad, it can be too bad, and in the pot!

Alright, maybe my dishes aren’t quite that extreme…

Anyway, every Saturday morning is Daddy turn to fix breakfast, and while the kids still want cold cereal, I get to make another scramble. And if I do it right, I get to have it the next day too. So for those of you who are a bit on the anal retentive side (Martha? Are you paying attention?), I’ve put an ingredient-oriented recipe in the sidebar. However, if you are actually reading my recipe, then you’re probably a type-b-hippie-throw-back who couldn’t follow algorithmic food preparation if the commune depended on it. Oh no, I’ve just offended both of my readers in one paragraph.

I’ll try to make amends by chatting about how I weave my culinary magic… that is, before the smoke alarm sounds and breakfast is ready.

I begin by “whacking” my onions and peppers. I called it whacking instead of dicing because at this point, my two year old is helping. Don’t worry, she’ll get bored and go off to catch Nick Jr. cartoons any minute now.

Done whacking? Good. Got your preheated skillet? No? Well, get turn the stove on and put some olive oil in it. Yeah, you better put a bit more, as we’ve got a lot of cooking to do. We now sauté (I mean, cook) the veggies that need a lot of time on the heat… for me that is onions and red bell peppers because I like my onions caramelized and my peppers gooey.

When they are just done, throw in the mushrooms and drizzle them with some vinegar. Why? Well, I just love the taste of sautéed mushrooms that have absorbed olive oil and vinegar. No, it doesn’t matter what vinegar you use, just grab that bottle there in the cupboard. Yeah, the one next to the ding-dongs.

While that is cooking, put a couple of heaping teaspoons of sun-dried tomato tapenade. It is basically minced dried tomatoes in olive oil. I often pick it up over at Trader Joe’s. You can also find it with pesto and other variations, but you have to have something similar, because this is the secret sauce… yeah, along with the love.

Sure if this was Martha Stewart’s web site, I would have grown the tomatoes in my organic garden, plucked them just before they fell off the vine, squeezed the juice from them with my bare breasts so as not to bruise them, and then dried them with my great-grandmother’s linen tablecloth… but this is my reality, and the smoke alarm is just about to go off.

Along with the tapenade, put in your hot sauce. No, it doesn’t matter what kind. I tend to like either a chipotle-based for the smokiness or Cholula, as it has a lot of flavor without the heat offending the rest of the family. But you want to add the hot sauce early enough in the cooking process to blend the flavors. Adding it to the cooling finished product on the dinner table is like giving flowers on February 15th.

Once this is all mixed in … see, I told you to use more olive oil … now throw in the minced garlic and the rest of the veggies. These veggies should be soft… well, not old and mushy, but things like zucchini or asparagus… not hard, like carrots or potatoes. You want to add the garlic to the middle of the cooking time, because if you adding them with the onions, they end up burning and getting bitter, but you want to get them in early enough to get the flavor permeating through the rest of the dish.

While the veggies are sautéing (I mean, cooking), let’s pop out front to the herb garden and get our feet muddy. Rosemary goes well with this dish (and it makes your fingers smell heavenly), but you can grab a few sprigs of just about anything. No, not everything as we don’t want to make this taste too complicated. Sure, we can use the tarragon next weekend. After wiping our feet, and waving to the honking cars who pass by… they act like they’ve never seen a grown man in pajamas ripping off branches of rosemary. Yeah, take a picture!

Mince up the herbs and explain to the two year old that some things in the front yard are fine to eat, but other things, like grass, are not. Throw that in, and let’s get the tofu.

There are two kinds of tofu in the world: the silken variety and the crumbly kind. You’ll prefer the crumbly kind for a scramble as it just looks rustic. OK, sure it also absorbs the flavor better. Who are you, Martha’s sister?

Take the cold tofu and squeeze as much of the water out of it as you can. Don’t worry about breaking it as we will be intentionally breaking it in just a minute. The package will tell you to break it apart with a fork, but since this is my reality, we’ll just use our fingers and make small clumps and throw it directly into the pan.

Sauté until done.

For those of you who aren’t comfortable with the whole vegan label, you crack some eggs and scramble them in there. The eggs will tend to bind the ingredients together, but at the expense of color from the vegetables.

Now the fun will begin, as my father-in-law will stop by and get a dish. He’ll first put a lot of ketchup on it, and then ask who made it. When he finds out that I did it, he’ll ask if there is tofu in it, and when I tell him there is, he’ll make himself some toast instead. Oh wait, that’s a bit too much information. Guess that means, I’m done here. Who wants to clean up?