End of the week, low in food, but found 2 recipes I can make with this book!
Heated up some olive oil to cook 4 smashed garlic, pepper flakes and 3 spoonful of tomato paste, cooked about 4 minutes. Added a can of crushed tomato and 1.5 can of water, added generously salt and pepper and brought it to a boil and cooked for another 10 minutes or so until it was a bit thickened. Stop the heat and added 3 spoonful of tahini, mixed the soup with a hand mixer and served with a drizzle of olive oil.
“Two eternal comforts, shakshuka and kimchi fried rice, finally meet.” A promising tagline of the recipe. So did it work?
Cooked the rice in a pan or in my case, a cast iron pot, with water, chopped kimchi and scallions (I used shallots), added some salt, brought it to a boil and cooked for 17 minutes covered and with lowered the heat. When the rice was cooked, made holes on the rice where the future eggs would go and the heat was increased and a few spoonful of oil (I use grape seed) was poured into the holes and the side of the pot, I added the eggs when the oil started bubbling and cooked for a few more minutes. Added more shallots (or scallions as in the recipe) and soy sauce.
I see the potential of this dish, but I think the recipe needs some tweaking. Since the kimchi was cooked with the rice, all the goodies of kimchi went into the rice, kimchi ended up and became just cooked cabbage. I think either you need to add a lot of kimchi in the cooking to make this dish good or you put half of the kimchi to cook with the rice initially, and extra kimchi on the top when serving. The crunchy rice at the bottom was very nice though. Maybe will make this again.
To make these, you put two cans of bean and their liquid in a skillet with some spices (cumin, coriander, smoked paprika), scallions, and minced green chile, and simmer, mashing them up a bit as they soften. Near the end of cooking, when they’ve thicken up, you stir in some butter, then top with grated cheddar and cook covered for a bit to melt the cheese. Top with pepitas, and more scallions and chile.
We served this spooned into warm tortillas with pico de gallo as tacos, and then once the tortillas were gone we dipped in with chips. As a taco filling, I prefer refried beans. This is one of those cases where I don’t really see the point of making the beans this way, as refrieds aren’t really any more difficult and actually take less time. As a dip however, this concoction was quite good, and I would prefer it to refrieds. So I would actually make it again if it were a dip I was after.
LLM has already described the method, so I’ll just say where I deviated. I used fewer cloves of garlic, but minced them. I used tofu feta. And I used two tablespoons of harissa instead of two teaspoons, because seriously? Two teaspoons? C’mon! After 20 minutes in the oven the dish was still a little soupier than I wanted, so I turned it to broil for a few minutes, but did not raise the oven rack. This got rid of excess liquid, but put minimal browning on the tofu. Like LLM, I did not find I needed to add salt. The combo of canned beans, capers, and feta was salty enough. Keep in mind if you taste before it goes in the oven, that the liquid is going to evaporate and be more concentrated in the final dish.
I served this with some homemade bread and called it a meal. We liked the beans very much. I had considered throwing some greens in at the very end, and might do that in the future, or serve with something green on the side.
When I saw Valadelphia’s review it immediately appealed to me as something I could make for Lulu’s lunches. Somehow in the book I’d turned the page with no interest (that seems to be a thing with me and this book - and I’ve found some great things thanks to this thread - I’m grateful). Given that the chickpeas didn’t really roast the way Valadelphia wanted them to, and that Lulu is used to unroasted bean salads in her lunch, I went the lazy route and didn’t bother with that step at all. Lulu is a big fan of cinnamon in her savory (me not so much, but this is for her), so I used coriander and a little cinnamon, and a couple shakes of cayenne, but skipped the allspice. No scallions in the house, so I slivered some red onion. No bulgar so I copied V and used Israeli couscous. I wish I’d added celery like she did, because that seems really appealing. End result is not my favorite ever bean salad, but definitely good, and I’d do it again, maybe changing up the spices, just to change things up a bit. I took a bite, then another bite, then another bite. So I think that’s a hit.
Delicious. I found some turkey salami at Trader Joe’s and figured I’d give this a try. Lulu was very skeptical, turns out she’s never had salami (I’m not a big fan, but I’m surprised it never happened elsewhere). She was a big fan of this dish. Like hirsheys, I just stirred the garlic and lemon in. I used a whole stick of butter instead of 6tablesoons. Used penne rigate instead of rigatoni. Served with a side of fennel salad, and it was a great meal on a chilly evening.
Well, this was a disappointment. I love shrimp, shishitos, glass noodles, and gochujang. But somehow this was blah. I think there just wasn’t enough of the gochujang, soy sauce, honey, sesame oil sauce for me. It had a bite, but not much of the flavor. No one was interested in their plate the night I made this. I think doubling the sauce would help a lot, but I’m not going to be the one to do it.
Despite being a vegetarian for decades, I’ve never mastered tempeh. I grab some a couple times a year --sometimes it’s great, sometimes not. It has a distinctive flavor, but strongly spiced recipes like this mute that.
I had been craving a reuben since I saw this report. I skipped the salad in the recipe and made a grilled sandwich on rye bread with sauerkraut and gouda. It satisfied the craving and will hopefully put better tempeh dishes in my repertoire!
You should maybe try it, and slightly up the sauce. For me, the sauce basically disappeared between making it in the bowl, then putting on the sheet pan, roasting, then getting off the sheet pan. But the sauce was delicious, and the roasted shrimp were tasty. There’s a good recipe here somewhere.
It seems the author has a light hand with spicy ingredients. I know with the two recipes I made with harissa, I felt the need to use a lot more than what she called for (triple the amount or more). And I’ve found myself upping certain spices in other recipes as well. Not all the spices - she doesn’t skimp on the cumin, say - but the chile-based ones.
MERGUEZ WITH SWEET POTATOES AND DATES (312)
I hope someone will make this as written–I still think it has potential even though mine did not turn out great. It could not be easier, but I multi-tasked and bombed it. You roast sweet potatoes with sausage, sliced lemons, and dates. As that cooks, you prepare an herb-garlic condiment. I did not consider that vital and just added chopped parsley at the end. Cilantro would have been good, too.
I don’t have a good vegetarian merguez sub (on my wish list), but I noticed Hodo makes “Moroccan Chermoula tofu cubes” so I decided to try that, adding a bit of the Spice House’s merguez seasoning. If I had fried it (like the tofu & broccoli recipe), it would have been better, but I just tossed it on the hot sheet pan.
The second issue was my sweet potato was subpar. It came from the farmers’ market, but it had sprouted and was just lackluster.
The good parts: the combo of spice and dates was nice, as were the thinly sliced lemons. Unfortunately I overcooked the whole thing–it is very easy to char the lemon and dates. Probably best to not clean out a closet while trying to cook dinner, but guests are coming!
I ate it on couscous and added some yogurt with preserved lemon. It has a dry tagine vibe–great flavors, just poorly executed (it happens).
I made a half recipe of this, sort of. It just seemed like more beans than I wanted, so I used one can, and I used two very large tomatoes. So my tomato:bean ratio was a little higher than what the recipe specifies. You just grate the tomatoes and stir in some olive oil, salt, pepper, and optionally some sherry vinegar or lemon juice (I used sherry vinegar). You drain and rinse the white beans (cannellini for me) and stir those in. Now, the thought of cold canned beans was not appealing to me at all. So I took this mixture and put it in a low oven for a while, so that it got warm, but not hot enough that the tomatoes were cooking. You rub toasted slices of ciabatta with garlic, and spoon the beans and tomatoes on top.
This is the simplest meal possible (except for me, as I had to make the bread from scratch). I liked it well enough. Mr. MM was not a big fan - he wanted the beans to be more stewed, and ended up putting his plate in the microwave to heat it up. The beans were lukewarm when I served them, which wasn’t warm enough for him.
OVEN QUESADILLAS P.72
I made these with refried beans and cheddar cheese, then topped with salsa. I liked that baking them crisped up the tortillas but then wished they were corn. Has anyone tried baking corn tortillas? I love fried corn tortillas but don’t make them anymore because I am lazy and they make a mess. I too could’ve used more flavor.
I’ve done corn (unrelated to this book) - works best if you lightly brush the bottom and and top faces with a bit of oil.
They get puffy and crisp, so if you don’t want them hard keep an eye on it (one of my nephews found them “too crunchy”, which makes sense, even though I didn’t know that could be a thing before that haha)
For flour (my own preference) I like them better folded over, not one tortilla over another.
(You can prevent puff / even out or speed up the top crisping by placing another pan over the quesadilla.)
When I made this, cauliflower hadn’t started coming in my CSA box yet, but I was getting broccoli, so I figured if it works with one it will work with the other and made the substitution. You rinse and drain some white beans (I used cannellini), and let get very dry. I spread them out on a dish towel. You combine olive oil, tomato paste, smoked paprika, red pepper flakes, salt and pepper in a large bowl. You add the cauliflower florets and white beans to that mixture and toss to coat. Spread across two sheet pans and roast. Seasoning is adjusted with more salt and pepper at the end. These are dressed with a mayo/garlic/sherry vinegar concoction, and also served with “soft herbs” (I used cilantro) dressed with sherry vinegar and olive oil (the amount of this dressing called for is too much, imho - who wants soggy, overdressed herbs?).
I wasn’t a big fan of this. The flavors were fine, but the beans and broccoli were dry. They really needed the garlic dressing just for the moisture. The herbs, on the other hand, were overdressed. I am a fan of roasting beans until crisp. It is a great way to do chickpeas, but it doesn’t work with every kind of bean, and it didn’t work with the cannellini. They burst open, dried out, but didn’t get crisp.
I made a half recipe of this. You are supposed to dump two cans of crushed tomatoes onto a sheet pan to start. I was making a half recipe, so got out a quarter sheet pan (assuming by “sheet pan” the author really means a half sheet pan). I was concerned that the dish wasn’t going to fit though. It just seemed like a lot of food to go in such a low-sided pan. So I pulled out a Pyrex baking dish with the same dimensions as the quarter sheet pan. It turns out that maybe that wasn’t a good idea. I don’t know. You combine the tomatoes, sliced onion, olive oil, salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes and roast until the sauce is thickened. You boil your pasta (I used a lentil/chickpea/rice spiral from The Modern Kitchen). In the cooking pot, you combine the cooked, drained pasta with the sauce and a bit of reserved pasta water, then spread it back out on the sheet pan. Top with cubes of mozzarella, dabs of ricotta, and a sprinkling of parm. This then goes under the broiler until the cheeses are starting to brown.
This was fine. Mr. MM liked it better than I did. It was just a little on the plain side for me. I did use more red pepper flakes than called for to give it a kick. I was just wanting more stuff in it. Also from the description I was expecting really crunch edges on this, but that didn’t happen. That may be a factor of my deeper-than-called-for pan, so YMMV.
