Imploding hotels and expensive tofu

Forays into non-fiction, courtesy of The New Yorker's food issue. From an article about egg cooks in Las Vegas, by Burkhard Bilger:

"The Flamingo was built in stages, like the Vatican. Its pink glass towers stand on the ruins of a low-slung nineteen-fifties pavilion with a neon column that bubbled like champagne. Beneath that lie the elegant remians of Bugsy Siegel's supper club and riding stables, from a time when horses could still be hitched in front of the stores downtown. The result is a maze of ramps, stairs, and blind corridors that crisscross behind the hotel's sleek new interiors, like something from an etching by Escher. 'This is why they implode hotels,' a former head of food service at the hotel told me."

and from an article about tofu, this recipe for shima dofu ($50 for a few slices), by Judith Thurman:

"Negotiate a contract for organic soybeans with a reliable farmer whose fields lie on the slope of Mt. Hira, in the Shiga Prefecture, where the soil and the water are unpolluted. Make sure that the farmer harvests the beans as late as possible--preferably in December. Pick the beans over carefully, throwing out those eaten by worms--a desirable sign that the farmer isn't cheating with a little DDT. Soak them overnight in very cold spring water. The beans will swell. Rinse them in more of the same, and grind them with a granite mortar, using all your strength, for two hours. Drain the pulp in a bamboo colander, and put the white soy juice you obtain--gojiu--to cook on a stone hearth. Let it bubble, subside, and bubble again, several times...hire a boat, and locate the tiny sland of Hateruma on your charts. The island is inhabited only by several hundred farmers, who raise sugarcane. Off the coast there is a coral reef...gather the seawater that cascades from the reef, which has an exceptionally rich and complex mineral content. This primordial bouillon is your curdling agent. Add some to the strained gojiu, stirring with a wooden paddle, and turn the thickened curds into the slatted, four-by-ten cedar boxes that you have lined with a fine-grained cheesecloth. Cover them, weight the covers with blocks of lava--about ten pounds per box--and leave them to dry."

This is why I order a lot of take-out.