I JUST CAME from yet another conversation about cooking that ended when the grown woman I was exchanging recipes with delicately wrinkled up her nose and said, "Tofu? Yuck! Why would anyone eat that?"

I'm not the kind of person who would say things like "Hot dogs? Yuck! There's ground-up cow lips in those!" or "Hamburger? Yuck! Don't you know there's enough E. coli to kill a horse in there?!," and so I have trouble understanding what exactly it is that causes relatively rational folks to revert to childlike behavior when it comes to tofu.

I love tofu. I love the innocent snow-white cubes of silken tofu floating in a bowl of miso and the decadent pillows of deep-fried lemongrass tofu at the Vege House. I love Trader Joe's savory baked tofu and the grilled tofu brochettes at Greens restaurant. Heck, I've even been known to shave off a chunk of the plain stuff and enjoy it straight out of the package.

Some folks, like my book-collecting friend Neil, are downright eloquent on the topic of their dislike of tofu: "Do I hate tofu?" he writes. "Hmm, hate might be too strong a word. For me, tofu lacks the distracting qualities I like in food that make me forget my daily problems with easily accessible tastes and sensations. I guess I use eating like movies or books, to get away from myself; with tofu, its strange and simple and unassuming texture, I have to focus on the more existential nature of things. I am not distracted, I have to sit there with myself and think, 'I am a man eating tofu.' "

But a Web search for "I hate tofu" unearths plenty of vitriol. I think it's because for most people, tofu is synonymous with vegetarianism. Die-hard meat-eaters, perhaps made anxious about their passion by reports of heart disease, stroke, and mad-cow disease (O Canada!) lash out at the one food they perceive as the dividing line between carnivorousness and vegetarianism. My partner puts it this way: meat eaters fear that eating tofu will turn them vegetarian the same way straight men fear that receiving oral sex from a man will immediately "turn them gay."

Of course, there are more prosaic reasons for disliking tofu. When I called John, a staunch meat-eater friend, to ask why he didn't like tofu, he replied, "It tastes like sponges! When it's hot, it tastes like hot sponges; when it's cold, it tastes like cold sponges."

Sponges, eh? I said to myself. I'll show him some nonspongy tofu. I hung up the phone and went into my kitchen. I made a graham-cracker crust and prebaked it in an eight-inch cake pan. I melted six ounces of chocolate chips in the microwave and threw them in the blender with a box of silken tofu and a spoonful of peanut butter. I poured the chocolate mixture into the crust and tossed it into the refrigerator.

While my three-year-old daughter relished the mixing spoon, I called John. "Can you come over for dinner tonight?"

"What are we having?" he asked, cagily.

"Pasta."

When the dishes were cleared, I brought out the chocolate-peanut butter tart. It had set up firm and glossy. I cut it into slices and plated it up alongside some fresh, organic strawberries that had just arrived in our weekly produce box. Everyone oohed and aahed. The tart was dense and chocolatey with a peanut-buttery complexity. Needless to say, there wasn't a trace of tofu flavor.

"You're eating tofu, you know," I announced after John had just about finished his piece. To his credit, he accepted his defeat with equanimity. "You got me," was all he said before stuffing another piece of the pie into his mouth.

• • •

A few years ago we spent nearly every nice weekend hiking to Bass Lake. Of course, I loved the easy hike and the beautiful views and the cool lake, but I think the real reason I made the trip so often was for the jerk tofu. After each hike we would drive into Bolinas and stop at the deli for snacks. I would choose the jerk tofu every time. The combination of the cool, firm tofu and the incendiary spices was addictive. I would dream of the stuff between trips.

Then, duh!, I realized I could make it myself.

Like a mad scientist, I began pressing tofu and marinating it in different seasonings. I gave up my hiking hobby for a tofu hobby. When I bought a jar of Walkerswood Traditional Jamaican Jerk Seasoning, rubbed the thick paste into some innocent-looking firm tofu (if your hands are not as destroyed as mine, you might want to use gloves for this), let it sit in the fridge for a while, and threw it into the oven.

The resulting dish was so spicy it nearly took the top of my head off. In other words, it was perfect.