Wine for Tofu Madness

My sister called me last night to say that she had a block of tofu and was wondering what she should do with it. And no, she was not actually asking for a meal suggestion. She was, in fact bringing to mind one of the oddest and worst roommate experiences I have ever had.

When I first moved to New York, I sublet a room in a two-bedroom apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The girl whose room I was subletting was someone I knew from the theatre, and since she seemed fairly normal, I assumed that her roommate and apartment would be, too. Well, you know what they say about assuming.

The apartment was in a terrific location, on 6th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, close to the subway and the main shopping drag. The apartment itself was, I should say, a bit odd. There was no living room to speak of, there were just two bedrooms, a bathroom, a large closet off the long narrow hallway and a kitchen. It wasn't dirty exactly, but it was dingy and dark, and felt old and a bit rundown. It also had mice, and one day when I came home, I found one of the mice writhing around in the closet, dying from some poison that the landlords must have put down. When my parents came to help me move into my own apartment, my father actually cried when he saw where I had been living. At the time I didn't think the place itself was that bad (you can put up with a lot more when you're young), it was the roommate who eventually sent me running for my life.

She was, without a doubt, one of the weirdest people I have ever not met. I say I didn't meet her because she never actually introduced herself or even said hello to me. I don't necessarily think that you have to be best friends with your roommate, but I do believe in actually being, you know, normal with them.

I am a friendly person for the most part, and since i had just moved to a new city when I got to Park Slope, I was hoping to at least have someone to talk to in the apartment, but she literally never came out of her bedroom when I was in the apartment (unless of course I was in my own room with the door closed). I don't remember her name, but I think it was something like Crazy McNutjob.

As I have mentioned, she did not appear to me in person, but she left evidence of her existence: a kitchen that smelled as if all she ate were hard-boiled eggs cooked in a vat of vinegar; a used tampon loosely wrapped in tissue and left on the bathroom shelf; poop on the bathroom floor; and the oddest item by far, a block of tofu in the toilet. Yes that's right. Tofu. In the toilet. This last one still baffles me beyond all reason.

She was actually at home when a friend of mine and I found the tofu in the toilet, and when I knocked repeatedly on her door to get her to talk to me about it she refused to open the door! She just completely ignored me, and I wound up saying a sentence I never in a million years would have dreamed I would say: "You know, you can't put tofu in the toilet." There then followed an even more bizarre scene of my friend and I trying to remove said tofu block with the assistance of various spoons, pulleys, levers and plungers. Let me just say this, it wasn't pretty.

Still to this day, I cannot imagine the thought process that would lead a person to believe that it was a good idea to put a block of tofu in a toilet. My sister suggested that perhaps she was just trying to cut out the middle-man.

In honor of Crazy McNutjob and the tofu madness, let's crack open a bottle of Hewitson Shiraz "Mad Hatter" McLaren Vale 2006. This is a beautiful example of what Australian Shiraz can be: rich and warm with a nose of raspberry, cherry, chocolate, plum, blueberry and smoke with a palate of chocolate, black cherry, blueberry, raspberry, dried leaves and tobacco. Yum. It doesn't really go with tofu, but then I wouldn't eat that tofu anyway; you now know where it's been.