11 - 1985 seemed for the most part like a good year

Tofu 01 in Mt. Compass  South Australia

11

Tofu 01 in Mt. Compass  South Australia
1985 seemed for the most part like a good year. We took a boat over to Kangaroo Island and spent a few days there. We went on lots of drives in the beginning of the year I bought a new truck on payments. Our Toyota truck was called a 4X4 because it had two seats and a pickup section in the back. It was a pickup truck or ute as they say in Australia and it had four-wheel drive. We had license plates that said TOFU01. We went everywhere. We drove on the beach and on unpaved roads and went on lots of short trips. We were getting to like the area between Mount Compass and the coastal town of Victor Harbor. On Wednesday and Friday night I would take the children to Lesia’s house in North Adelaide and go to work and collect them on Thursday and Monday morning and take them on my delivery early in the morning and Lesia went to work and then the children and I would head back to Mount Compass.

Making tofu at the factory was hard. I would drive into Adelaide on Wednesday morning and Friday evening and soak the beans in a large stainless tub divided in two. Each half would hold a couple of hundred gallons of water. I would put in one fifty-kilo bags of beans and let the water run to wash them for a couple of hours and set up for my manufacturing that I would begin at five AM the next morning. One fifty-kilo bag would give me about 75 kilos or 150 blocks of tofu and I was selling 250 to 300 blocks of tofu on Monday and another 100 to 150 blocks on Wednesday. Monday and Thursday became my delivery days. I made most of my products, except for the cheesecakes that I made twice a week, on the weekend. Most of my interstate products were burgers and spring rolls and I sent very little tofu beyond Adelaide. After I would leave the children with Lesia on Wednesday night I would work through the night. On the weekend I would sleep in my office on a mat on the floor and it would be the last sleep I would get until Monday. Saturday morning I would start the water running to wash the beans for the last time and then I would scoop them, bucket by bucket, through the grinder that Jurgen Klein had loaned me. (I will now try to explain my setup, which I have never tried to explain before and without pictures I will do the best I can to explain how I made tofu.

Making tofu at the factory was hard. I would drive into Adelaide on Wednesday morning and Friday evening and soak the beans in a large stainless tub divided in two. Each half would hold a couple of hundred gallons of water. I would put in one fifty-kilo bags of beans and let the water run to wash them for a couple of hours and set up for my manufacturing that I would begin at five AM the next morning. One fifty-kilo bag would give me about 75 kilos or 150 blocks of tofu and I was selling 250 to 300 blocks of tofu on Monday and another 100 to 150 blocks on Wednesday. Monday and Thursday became my delivery days. I made most of my products, except for the cheesecakes that I made twice a week, on the weekend. Most of my interstate products were burgers and spring rolls and I sent very little tofu beyond Adelaide. After I would leave the children with Lesia on Wednesday night I would work through the night. On the weekend I would sleep in my office on a mat on the floor and it would be the last sleep I would get until Monday. Saturday morning I would start the water running to wash the beans for the last time and then I would scoop them, bucket by bucket, through the grinder that Jurgen Klein had loaned me. (I will now try to explain my setup, which I have never tried to explain before and without pictures I will do the best I can to explain how I made tofu.

I would dump the ground beans into my hundred-gallon cooker and once it came to a boil I would cook it for fifteen minutes. Because I did not have the money to buy anything high tech I would empty the cooker of the slurry one five-gallon bucket at a time and pour it into my stainless-steel container. The container was a three-foot high cylinder inside of which was a large bag made of loosely woven muslin cloth and there was a tap (faucet) at the bottom. I had a small compressor hooked up to an old train brake to use as an extractor.  On the bottom of the train brake was a flat piece of round metal and when I started the compressor the train brake with the flat piece of round metal attached would come down on the muslin bag and press the slurry until all the soymilk was extracted and what was left was the okara.

The pressing was so effective that the okara was almost dry by the time the hard metal rod had pressed the steaming hot white milk out of the beans in its ultimate climax.  As the milk sat in the bucket I would mix in the coagulant, which in my case was calcium sulphate (gypsum) that I bought by the fifty-kilo bag from Port Adelaide. They said it was food grade and what would I know? With in a few minutes the milk would begin to curd, and I would pour the bucket into my cloth-lined boxes. I had started off the first couple of years of tofu making with clear plastic baby basinets from the hospital. We bought a dozen at an auction and I never asked where they came from. Maybe in the cosmic scheme of things a baby that was in one of those basinets at birth later on became a tofu customer and ate tofu out of his or her original little home-box. I had bought some stainless steel boxes at an auction and I drilled holes in them and got stainless steel sheets cut for covers and drilled holes in them and had very good tofu forming boxes. I would put buckets of water on each box and as the whey drained out of the holes the curds were pressed into tofu. The heavier the weight and longer it was pressed the firmer the tofu. I would not want to press the tofu for more than an hour because it would lower the shelf life. Once I had my box of tofu I would turn the box upside down and with a contraption I made out of fish wire I would section off twelve blocks of tofu per box and then dump it into my large stainless steel tubs with running water. I would vacuum pack the tofu as soon as I could and I would end up with tofu that could last a month versus lasting about a week when I would just bag it and deliver it in water.

This is how I remember making tofu.

I realize it does not paint a very vivid and accurate picture but the actual making of tofu is not really the primary point of this story. The primary point of telling this, part 2, is to try and see what happened in the raising of Sacha and Leigh and whether making tofu had an effect on them, I cannot say but the resultant activities due to the manufacturing of tofu surely had an impact on us.

And that is the tall and shortness of how I made tofu at that time in my life. It was, to sound Australian, bloody hard. It would take me until late Saturday afternoon to get all the tofu made. Each cycle would take at least three hours from when I began grinding the beans to bring the water to boil and the slurry to boil then to extract it. I would make about three batches at a time which would take me into the early afternoon. Eventually I got to make five batches, and it would take me until evening and then I would buy a couple of bottles of beer, the 750 ml size and get myself in the mood for the evening’s work of packing the tofu. Sometime around mid-morning I would have the factory cleaned and the tofu packed and labelled, and I would prepare for the next phase which was making secondary products. Making burgers one at a time was a painfully slow process.

On my way back from visiting my family, Christmas 1984, and travelling through Europe I stopped in Germany to meet a friend of Jurgen who sold food production equipment. I bought a burger making machine that was supposed to make several hundred patties an hour. I paid $3000 for it and shipped it to my factory. When it arrived in early May I spent many days trying to get it to work as a tofu burger-making machine. It was made to make meat burgers and the tofu would clog every part of the machine. I tried different mixtures but nothing worked, and I dragged that machine from place to place for the next fifteen years, even years after my tofu business no longer existed I had that burger machine with me. It was very heavy, and I gradually lost parts for it and now I have no idea where it is. I think I left it in the backyard of the last house I lived in, Tenterton Road, Christies Downs, so if anyone happens to go by there it is probably still sitting by the tree alongside the fence that kept our property separated from the Christies Beach Primary School.

Every once in a while, I hold onto something that I no longer need, year after year, and drag it with me like some memorial token of a pain that I want to be rid of but that never really goes away. I suppose it is good that I have not lived any place for more than a couple years for the past fifty-years or I would have an awful lot of stuff. Even now in 2004 I have a shed full of my belongings in Adelaide and here I am living in upstate New York. Lesia has not moved from her property since before we met more than twenty-five years ago and in that time, I have moved at least fifteen times if not closer to twenty. I would have stayed in one place all these years, but something always happens, and I am off to somewhere else. I think the point I was making was that if I had not moved for the past twenty-five years, I would have everything that I had collected during that whole time. My parents were like that - they would never throw anything away. We had an attic and a basement just crammed full of everything from newspapers to books to just junk. My brother, Robert, was like that and he moved as much as me, and he just had all this crap that he would drag from place to place. My father went into the nursing home last year in June of 2003 when he was 98, the day after Narda and I returned to Australia for a visit. When we came back, we spent the month of September throwing away so much stuff and that is with him living in a trailer and he still managed to fill every drawer every cupboard and every space with junk. After the burger patties were made, I made the tofulafels. I did have the big mixer so that was good, and I was able to make all the burger mix at one time. The tofulafels went a lot quicker as I could scoop them faster than pressing my patties out one at a time.

I also had a large deep fryer, and I could cook several dozen tofulafels or about a dozen patties at a time. As I never kept recipes my burgers as well as all my products never tasted quite the same twice. My burgers, basics, consisted of tofu, brown rice, whole-wheat flour, okara, carrots, and various amounts of herbs and spices. I had my plain and my Mexican burgers and a spice burger but essentially the only thing that was different was the amount of spice I put in them. I had dozen of products; from baked marinated tofu (thinly sliced tofu that was marinated overnight in the cool room in a mixture of soy sauce and spices and herbs) to burgers, spring rolls, cheesecakes, and some just plain total failures. Two of my biggest blunders in the world of secondary tofu products were Boston Baked Bread and Baked Tofu Pudding. I had designed the label before I had made the product which I am sure is some sort of marketing no no. I was so impressed by my label that I had ten-thousand made thinking these would be the great products that would put Light Foods Tofu on the world market. The pudding never got to the baking stage and neither did the Boston Brown Bread. I made steamed tofu nut-laced bread but no one would buy it. I could not even get the shops to take it as they began to complain that I had so many products that they could not keep track of them, and the customer base was just too small to come up with several new products every week as I did. I had a tofu spaghetti sauce along with tofu cookies and tofu candy, but they just ended up in the rubbish. The few people who entered my circle thought I was going a bit crazy with my production but that never slowed me down and like everything I have done in life from tofu production, to relationship management (my own), to picture-poems, cult orders, astrology, education, to my thousands and thousands of Webpages I have created over the past decade I just go forward. I am sure this bit of writing I have undertaken to tell my children will no doubt turn into a production and not just a few essays as I had originally planned. One product I thought was a real stroke of genius and I see something similar in the US grocery stores is tofu with herbs and spices and some salad crap already in it. Unfortunately, it did not sell though I never knew why. I would mix spices and herbs with some salad crap in with the curds before I would press them and by the time I would go to vacuum pack them I had a tasty block of food. Maybe the idea was too strange and people liked to mix their own stuff in with their tofu when they made their dish with it.

Sometime in 1985 I hired a man from Viet Nam to work in my factory. The Australian government had a scheme where a company could hire someone, and they would pay most of their wages for six months and then the employer would give full pay. The first six months were to be a training period and the government must have thought it was a good idea because a lot of people did it. The bad part was that employers would do the six-month subsidy then when it ran out they would let the employee go. Of course, this was not in the spirit of the deal and was quite a mean thing to do. I decided from the beginning that I would not do the same thing. The man who worked for me did not speak English, but he surely knew what tofu was and he worked quite well. I thought I was a good boss, never having been one before, but he quit at the end of the six months. He did send over a friend of his who spoke more English, a couple of dozen words at least. The new person worked much harder and soon he brought his whole family to the tofu factory on weekends. His wife and three children would line up on Sundays and make spring rolls in an assembly line and the spring rolls were perfect and tasted much better than mine and my sales went up rapidly. The family would not let me pay them anything for their work and I would go to their home and have dinner with them on occasion. Apparently, they were quite wealthy in Viet Nam. He was a general or some high up military official and she either was from some royal family or had something to do with one. They had to flee Viet Nam and ended up being boat people and eventually found their way to Australia and to my tofu factory. They were very well mannered and had found several means of making money. Their home was a miniature sweatshop factory and the whole family sewed garments for one of the main retailers in Adelaide. For example, they would get two dollars a blouse and the same garment would sell for a hundred dollars at the retailers. Within six months they had a house full of good furniture and they were paying off their house all from working their butts off. I would come across people complaining that there were no jobs or they could not make ends meet with the welfare money they collected and here were people that were new to Australia who worked hard and were able to put their life together.

I found only one other letter from 1985 in my father’s possessions:

Greetings
Time goes so fast then I realize I haven’t written for a while.
The children are good. Here are some photos of us on Kangaroo Island. We took a six-hour ferry over.
I’m getting things in the supermarket after all these years so that looks good also I am sending a lot of products to Melbourne and Sydney.
Thank you for the Bible and the children get so excited when they get a package from grandpa in America.
I have also started a new business making children’s furniture for a store Im opening in town. They are beds in cars, and Sacha has a rocket bed.
Love Terrell and us all     17/7/85

Findhorn, Scotland June 2007

 Until I recently read this letter I had forgotten about my other "big business". I had designed some furniture for children and as circumstances would have it there was a person in my tofu factory who was good with his hands. For several months a married couple rented out the front of my tofu factory to make their health foods that they delivered and eventually we all delivered together. They were into one of those religious cults; the Church Universal and Triumphant (Summit Lighthouse) of Elizabeth Clare Prophet. It was even more nuts than the Order that I had been in. The couple had met at Findhorn spiritual retreat & Ecovillage in Scotland.
Looking up today’s community news on the Internet for Findhorn we read that, “Crystal the Cat moves Into the Light: Many of us mourn Eileen's cat Crystal who died earlier this week.” [13 Feb 2004]. That just sums up my knowledge of the place, something about animals and humans and all entering into the light.

However, what I did know was that the woman of the couple in her risen and great spiritual depths was screwing a bloke that I was going into business making furniture with. When her husband went off to buy supplies (and they were sending him off quite frequently), the wife and George would go at it and when the husband returned they would act like nothing had happened. Of course, I am not putting a moral slant on this; after all, people of all types of beliefs screw around. I know a woman who was married for decades and was active in her church and no one would have suspected her having affairs but she did, one after another, year after year, and not anyone from the husband to the church folks ever suspected. It is probably just human nature. All three characters in my tofu factory were always mouthing spiritual concepts and quoting good old Liz Prophet or some ancient, ascended master that they claim they too were in touch with. The tofu factory was quite the place in those days. Full of deception and spiritual platitudes.

Our, George and my, new combined business, consisted of making cars and planes and boats and putting beds in them. We had great plans and we were going to have a factory and storefront in Adelaide then start a chain of stores across Australia. In fact, after a lot of my money was spent for timber and wood cutting devices all we ever got was a rocket bed that for many years was a feature of our house. (In the photo of the rocket bed Leigh is standing down in front and Sacha is in the back standing up. The people who shared my tofu factory had a few children and so did George. I never knew who belonged to whom or in fact how many there were in total but often I would have three or four of them staying in Mount Compass with me. They are the children on top of the rocket bed in the photo. I know about a dozen years later Leigh had a short affair with one of the children, I think it was George’s daughter, Suzanne. I think they went together for a few weeks or months. However, teenagers much like the small children that were always crawling around my home, look a bit the same. I remember one time when I went into Leigh’s room to put away some laundry in about 1996 when he would have been about thirteen, he was laying on his bed kissing a girl and I thought it was Suzanne. I said “hi Suzanne” but it was not her and Leigh was upset with me for a few weeks about my mistaken identity.

The children’s fantasy bed-furniture company never materialized and by the end of 1985, it was another thing from a past that constantly goes onto shelves of memories.

The shelves are getting heavy and soon they will break and I will go off into the world alone with nothing including memories to impede me any longer.
I was getting very restless and homesick. Even with all my great business plans, all which I believed were in germination and not failures or successes quite yet. I felt trapped. I was in reality a prisoner of Australia I could have the children live with me but I could not leave the country with them I could not even move interstate with Sacha and Leigh. I had been looking at the prospect of us moving to Victoria and had found what I thought was a good place for us outside of Melbourne. I had not been there physically, but I had read enough about the area to believe it was the area for us. Melbourne also represented a larger market, and I thought I could do both the tofu and get my picture-poem trip back on track as well as take on astrology reading and probably even get the children’s furniture constructs going once again. In July of 1985 I asked Lesia if I could take the children to New York for a visit. Their grandparents were getting old, and it seemed like the thing to do. She said under no circumstances could I take them out of the country or even out of South Australia so I went to court. We appeared on August 20th and one of the 27 statements she made stated she was opposed to my traveling to New York with the kids. And just to make my life impossible she wanted me to take access of the children from Friday PM each weekend until 6 PM on Sunday. The weekend is when I had to make my food products to deliver on Monday. We had several court appearances, and I seemed to be always off with a lawyer though I do not remember much of this period except for the day we appeared in court. I told the judge that my father was old, in fact he was eighty, and my mother was in a nursing home, and I did not expect either one to live much longer. The only thing I recall the judge asking the wife was whether she agreed that my father was old I did not understand why they still referred to us as if we were married or joined karmically at the soul but once married always married at some level of existence I suppose. Whatever happened on that day in court I got all I asked for.  I really did not expect to get permission to go but on the 24th of October 1985 the ruling was that I could apply for a passport for Sacha and Leigh. I was given leave from the 13th day of December 1985 until January 11th 1986. I had to give the children’s passports to the court upon our return but that seemed like a fair exchange. We were on the way to freedom, howbeit only for a month but it was freedom, nevertheless.

travel to USA with Sacha and Leigh age five and two and a half

Of course, the fact that I would be travelling with two children at the age of two and a half and five seemed like an easy task for me. We had been living together for the past year and I had this parenting thing down to a fine art.

12 - Goals for 1987

Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 77.