Spring (Apr–Jun) 2024 Quarter Cookbook of the Month: TENDERHEART

[MelMM (Mel)]

SPINACH AND BLACK BEAN ENCHILADA BAKE - p. 382

I don’t know why I don’t make enchilada casseroles. I always like them when I do. I have to say I approached this one with a bit of trepidation. Could a Chinese-Australian pull off a decent enchilada casserole? Yes, it turns out.

You start by making the sauce. Sauté garlic, cumin, ground coriander, smoked paprika, and red pepper flakes in some oil. Add canned crushed tomatoes and some vegetable stock. Season with salt, pepper, and a bit of sugar, and cook for… the book says 15 minutes, covered. I made a few changes. I wasn’t feeling having whole cumin seeds in this sauce, so I used freshly ground cumin. I typically only by whole peeled tomatoes, so I used those, whizzed briefly in the blender, instead of crushed. Since this sauce, after the addition of the vegetable stock, was very thin, I cooked it uncovered until it thickened as much as I wanted (I still kept it fairly thin). When the sauce was cooked I tasted it, and it was quite good. I felt like it was going to be the make or break for this recipe, since otherwise it was very simple.

To assemble, you oil a baking dish, put down a little sauce, then tile the bottom with 6 tortillas. Put down a layer of fresh spinach - this recipe calls for a lot of spinach. Top with some sliced scallion, some more sauce, some grated cheese, and season with salt & pepper. More tortillas go down, then next layer is a drained can of black beans, and it similarly gets topped with scallion, sauce, and cheese. Another spinach layer on top of that, and it is finished with a layer of tortillas with just a thin layer of sauce, and more scallions and cheese. Bake it, let rest a bit, slice and serve. This is supposed to serve four, which is accurate with very generous portions. If you had some rice and an ear of corn, you could serve 6.

We liked this a lot, so I’m telling myself I need to make enchilada casseroles more often. We have half of this thing left over, and I’m really looking forward to finishing it off.

[MelMM (Mel)]

SWEET POTATO AND BLACK SESAME MARBLE BUNDT - p. 413

This cake had the option to make it gluten-free and vegan with simple substitutions. GF flour blend for the all-purpose to make it GF, and vegan butter, flax eggs and plant milk to make it vegan. I only realized after I got started that I didn’t have enough flax left to make the flax eggs, so I made flax/chia eggs instead. You are supposed to start off by steaming chunks of sweet potato. I’ve been baking a lot with sweet potato in the last year, and I like to cook the sweet potato in the microwave. That “potato” setting on the microwave that you thought was useless? It works perfectly for a whole, unpeeled sweet potato. So that’s what I did here. Your base batter is made by blending butter with sugar, vanilla, and the “eggs.” Then you mix in the flour, baking powder, and salt. This batter gets divided in two, and the sweet potato gets mixed in with one half, and the other half gets black tahini that has been thinned with (plant) milk. My base batter was more the thickness of cookie dough than cake batter, so I had to add a bit of plant milk there as well, to get a better consistency. You scoop the sesame and sweet potato batters by turns into a prepared bundt pan, use a chopstick to marble (I did a shitty job of marbling) and bake.

This cake worked, which, when you are making a GF and vegan cake, is saying a lot. I felt the recipe was fussier than it needed to be, and part of that was the author avoiding calling for a stand mixer. There is no real reason the butter needs to be melted. Just beat it in the mixer. There is also no reason, in a batter that doesn’t rely on, say, whipped egg whites, to be folding in the sweet potato and tahini. They can be beaten in as well. So if this cake were to become part of my repertoire, streamlining the recipe would be on the agenda.

But I don’t think this cake will be part of my repertoire. It was a perfectly good cake. But perfectly good cake doesn’t really do it for me. The sweet potato cake I developed last year is full of flavor from apples and cinnamon, and sports a delicious chai-spiced glaze. It also has a better texture than this cake and yet no added fat (because sweet potato… it can do that). So while this cake is fine, it just doesn’t stack up to the competion. Sweet potato doesn’t really add much flavor to a cake. It adds moisture and a gentle sweetness. The black sesame did add a flavor, but it was subtle. If you like subtle in your cakes, this recipe might be for you. But I like my baked goods to hit me over the head with flavor just like my savory foods do. Another reason I probably won’t make this again is the black tahini, which I just don’t see myself buying on any regular basis. It seems like a gimmicky ingredient to me that cost more and is harder to come by, but doesn’t add enough to be worth the expense and trouble. I’m happy to track down ingredients when it is justified, but black tahini just isn’t very exciting.

[MelMM (Mel)]

THE WHOLE TURNIP PASTA - p. 470

This recipe got me very excited because it called for both the root and the greens of the turnip. The problem was that turnips are a cool weather thing around here. Harris Teeter tends to carry them when they are in season locally, so I had no joy finding them. Then I popped into Food Lion, and there they were… out of season turnips. And greens. I had to buy them separately, and they weren’t the kind specified. The bunches of greens were HUUUUGE. I’m going to be playing the turnips with every meal game for a while.

It isn’t clear from the ingredient list, but you need 7 oz of turnip greens for this recipe (which is a lot, but I have sooo much more than that). You split that in half and use 3.5 oz for the turnip green pesto, and 3.5 oz get sautéed with the turnips. To make the pesto, you blend the greens with garlic, pistachios, salt, a tiny bit of water, and a hefty amount of olive oil. For the turnips, you pan fry them in chunks, then add some water and a lid to the pan and let them steam until tender. You then remove the lid, and toss in garlic and the turnip greens, and season. you cook until the greens are wilted. Cooked pasta gets tossed with the turnips and greens, and the pesto gets stirred into that. More pistachios go on as a garnish.

Because I seem to be incapable of remembering a garnish, the pistachios didn’t get added until after the picture. I DID add them, I was just too lazy to go take a new picture. I used a red lentil pasta for this dish, which is not pretty, but the nutrition is worth it.

No surprise that I loved this dish. I love turnips. I love pesto made from more flavorful greens like turnip and mustard. I had really been looking forward to this dish and wasn’t disappointed.

Imagine chopped pistachios on here:

[stockholm28]

HOISIN-GLAZED CAULIFLOWER with MIXED GRAINS and RICE, page 151

This is basically a sheet pan supper with rice. It is very simple although the fact that it contains two sub-recipes may lead you to believe otherwise.

I got a cauliflower in my CSA bag and was looking for something simple to make with it. This book is organized by vegetable which made it easy to flip through the cauliflower recipes and find one that worked with ingredients that I already had on hand.

This is basically cauliflower tossed in a homemade hoisin sauce, roasted on a sheet pan, served over mixed rice and quinoa, and sprinkled with peanuts and cilantro. I liked this, but not so much I want to make it again. It was a bit sweet for me, but hoisin sauce is sweet so that was not a surprise.

The takeaway for me was the homemade hoisin. It was easy and made with ingredients that I nearly always have in my fridge or pantry. The next time I have a recipe that calls for hoisin, I might just make half a batch of this rather than buying a jar to languish in the fridge. The homemade hoisin is made by whisking together 1/4 cup soy sauce, 2.5 Tbsps tahini, 1 grated garlic clove, 2.5 Tbsps brown sugar, 2 tsps toasted sesame oil, 1 tsp rice vinegar, 1/8 - 1/4 tsp black pepper, 1 - 2 tsps doubanjiang or miso (I used miso). It yields 1/2 cup.

You cut the cauliflower (about 900g) into 1” thick wedges, place it on sheet pan, drizzle with 3 - 4 Tbsps of Hoisin sauce and 2 - 3 Tbsp of olive oil. Season with salt and pepper. Toss cauliflower to coat. Roast at 400F for 25 to 30 min.

She serves it over mixed grains. Her technique of cooking all three grains together didn’t really work for me and I ended up with a mushy blend of rice and quinoa rather than separate grains. I would cook the grains separately if I made this again. To make the mixed grains you rinse 1 C brown rice, 1/2 C white rice, and 1/4 C quinoa and place in a saucepan and cover. Add 2 1/3 cups water. Bring to a simmer (8 - 10 min). Reduce heat to med. Cook 30 - 35 min. When done, turn off heat and let steam 10 min. Timing may vary by brand.

Serve mixed grains topped with cauliflower. Drizzle add’l hoisin over. Top with 1/3 cup chopped, roasted peanuts and cilantro. Drizzle with olive oil.

[MelMM (Mel)]

EVERYTHING BREAD SOUP - p. 449

This is kind of an Italian/Asian mashup. You sauté onion and celery, then add garlic and gochugaru. Then add tomato paste, a bit of sugar, salt, chickpeas, canned crushed tomatoes, and vegetable stock. Simmer for about 20 minutes. The recipe then has you add some miso paste and a fresh filled pasta (ravioli in the picture) and kale stems. You cook this for 5 minutes then add kale leaves and torn up bread and remove from the heat.

OK, I feel very strongly that you can’t just add kale to a soup at the very end of cooking. I’ve had soups like that and they are, imho, awful. Soup shouldn’t have tough stuff in it, and kale needs to be cooked thoroughly. My feelings here, you may disagree. Clearly the author does. So I added the kale way earlier in the process, at the same time as the chickpeas and tomatoes. I would do that again. I didn’t use the kale stems at all (shoot me), but if I had, I would have sautéed them with the onion and celery.

I also had to come up with a work around for the ravioli. I can’t just go out and buy gluten-free, vegan ravioli (they exist, but not that easy to find). So I used rotini, the red lentil variety. Just 4 oz of that to take the place of 1 lb of fresh ravioli. It was the right amount. So my pasta went in, the soup cooked for 8 minutes more, and then I added the miso (thinned with some broth) at the end, just before the bread.

I liked this a lot, as I made it. I know I wouldn’t have found it edible with uncooked kale in there. But with that change, this was a hit. I’m sure I’d like it even better with ravioli in there, but it was fine with plain pasta. If you don’t have ravioli or tortellini on hand, I wouldn’t let that stop you from making this soup.

[maestra]

CAULIFLOWER ADOBO
I took the advice of these boards and bought the ebook when it was marked down. I don’t have an opinion about it overall yet. This type of recipe seems like a theme in the book, and actually is a theme in my own cooking: make a common/famous dish but substitute some vegetable for the meat. Same sauce, no meat.
For this dish you brown cauliflower, then slivers of garlic, and then stew it all in a typical adobo sauce. This version uses equal parts soy sauce and rice vinegar, and it was a little too tart for me on days 1 and 2. I ate it, but I didn’t look forward to it. I returned to it on day 4, and by then the flavors have mellowed and combined, and now the sauce is craveable. Cauliflower alone over rice isn’t very interesting, so I’ve been rounding it out with sauteed kale, avocado, and walnuts.
I might make this again because it’s pantry-friendly (soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, bay leaf, black peppercorns); it’s something I can whip up when it’s time to cook for my week’s lunches but I don’t have time or ingredients for a more elaborate dish.