Tag Archives: Vegetarian

Spiced Braised Lentils and Tomatoes with Toasted Coconut

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Currently cooking from Cook This Now by Melissa Clark

I have been trying to write this blog post for a week now. I wanted to find a way to make this dish sound sexy and appealing, but I’ve come to the conclusion that lentils are neither sexy nor appealing. They are filling, nutritious and, in this case, quite delicious. Solid, but not sexy.

You start out by softening scallions, garlic and curry powder in butter until the scallions have softened. Next you stir in tomato paste and lentils and cook for a few more minutes before adding fresh (or, in my case, diced, canned) tomatoes, salt and enough water to cover everything. This mixture simmers for about 40 minutes until the lentils are tender. The dish is served with a dollop of sour cream or yogurt and a little trick that Clark just barely mentions in the headnotes. As the lentils are simmering, you take flaked, unsweetened coconut, salt and mustard seeds and toast them on the stovetop. This sweet, salty, crunchy  mixture gets sprinkled over the lentils right before serving.

If you maneuver your spoon just right, you get a mouthful of the tender-but-toothsome spicy lentils with a little bit of the cooling yogurt and a salty crunch from the topping. Put all that together and you get sexy lentils.

If you can, try to use the green lentils, rather than the brown or the red ones. The red ones will turn into mush, and the brown ones will break down too much. The green lentils stay just a little bit firm and separate, almost beady. And don’t leave out the topping. This really was the star of the recipe, and I found myself using it with rice and salads. In fact, I liked eating it by the spoonful straight out of the jar.

Mediterranean Tuna Melts and other recipes

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Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve made a number of recipes out of this book. I’ve been too lazy to hold up dinner to take pictures, so I’ve been reluctant to talk about those dishes. Instead, I thought I’d do a wrap-up post, starting with the one dish I did manage to take a picture of:

Mediterranean Tuna Melts!
Normally, I don’t like tuna. All that fishy taste and fishy-smelling breath and gloopy mayo. But I liked these sandwiches. Water-packed tuna is mixed with mayo, lemon juice, red onion and artichoke hearts and piled onto toasted bread. The tuna mixture is topped with tomatoes and slices of provolone cheese and then broiled until the cheese is bubbly and melty. Melty cheese makes everything taste better.

Polenta with Mushroom Sauce
Polenta is not a fixture in our kitchen. I tried it, once, and found it to be bland in the extreme. But in this dish, browned and served with a creamy mushroom sauce, well, the polenta was still pretty bland. Fortunately, the mushroom sauce was full of flavor thanks to sherry, onions, rosemary and garlic. The recipe takes tubes of prepared polenta, slices them into rounds and cooks the rounds in a skillet until a brown crust forms. I liked the textural difference between the crusty outside of the polenta and the creamy insides. This isn’t my favorite dish by far, but it was warm and filling.

Sausage and Tortellini Soup with Spinach
This broth-based pasta soup was Bryan’s pick for Sunday supper several weeks ago, and he did a great job with this recipe. It was a nice change of pace for me to come home to find supper on the table. The soup starts out by browning sausage (we used hot Italian sausage), onions and garlic. Chicken broth and fresh cheese tortellinis are added to the pot and simmered until the pasta is tender. Right before serving, baby spinach is stirred in and cooked just until wilted. This, along with some homemade bread, made a nice, light supper.

Skillet Chicken Tetrazzini
This was another of Bryan’s Sunday suppers. Using a store-bought rotisserie chicken, Bryan had this casserole-type dish on the table in less than an hour (and most of that time was spent chopping mushrooms and onions and shredding chicken meat). The dish starts off by cooking onions and mushrooms in butter until browned. Egg noodles are then cooked in the same skillet in a mixture of chicken broth and half-and-half until tender. Finally, the chicken, lemon juice, frozen peas and a bit of thyme are added to the skillet, and the whole dish simmers until the chicken and peas are warmed through. Unlike traditional tetrazzinis that use a cheese sauce, this casserole was right, but light. And it was done on the stovetop with one dish. We happily ate leftovers for several days.

Chickpea Cakes with Cucumber-Yogurt Sauce

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Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

I love hummus. And hummus is made with chickpeas. So I was sure I’d like these vegetarian patties made primarily with the beans. I wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t love them. I did, however, love the cucumber-yogurt sauce.

The patties are made by crushing two cans of chickpeas and mixing in eggs, bread crumbs, scallions, spices and a shallot. The mixture is formed into patties and fried in a little bit of olive oil.

The patties had okay flavor and a nice meaty texture, but they were a bit dry. Especially on the second day, when I reheated several in the microwave.

The real star of the recipe, the yogurt sauce, is simply shredded, drained cucumbers mixed with scallions and plain Greek yogurt. Some sort of alchemy takes place, as this sauce becomes greater than its parts. Without the sauce, this recipe would be boring.

Honey and Orange Tofu

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Currently cooking out of Make It Fast, Cook It Slow by Stephanie O’Dea

You start off this dish by frying cubes of cornstarch-tossed tofu in butter. Once the tofu develops a bit of a crust, you put it in the slow cooker, then pour in a sauce made of orange juice, soy sauce, garlic and honey. Then you top everything off with broccoli florets and cook it, on low, for 3 to 5 hours.

When I took the lid off my slow cooker 3 hours after starting this dish, I was greeted by gray broccoli and chewy tofu in a tasteless, congealed sauce. I’m still agoggle at how a dish made from such flavorful ingredients (okay, maybe not the tofu but orange juice! soy sauce! garlic!) could turn out so, so wrong. I dumped the entire dish into the trash and made some frozen garlic chicken pasta from a store that rhymes with “bostco.”

Just thinking about this dish makes me want to gag a little bit.

Here’s the link to the recipe on O’Dea’s blog: http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/2008/04/crockpot-honey-and-orange-tofu-recipe.html

Bell Pepper Frittata

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bell_pepper_frittataCurrently cooking from Tasty by Roy Finamore

After the excesses of my last cookbook, I wanted something a little more waistline friendly. Tasty, by Roy Finamore, is more of an all-purpose cookbook. While there are some desserts in it, there are also lots of salads, soups and side dishes.

The dish first in the lineup is a bell pepper frittata. A frittata is sort of  like an omlet, except it is started on the stovetop and finished in the oven. Frittatas are quick and lend themselves to all sorts of variations. In addition, frittatas are generally good warm or cold.

This frittata starts out by sauteing slices of bell pepper until slightly browned. I happened to have part of an onion sitting in my fridge, so I added that to the bell pepper. Once the pepper is soft and browned, you add a mixture of milk, pecorino cheese and eggs. Once the eggs are slightly set, the whole dish goes into the oven so the eggs finish cooking.

This frittata was good, but wet. See, I hate eggs that are even the slightest bit undercooked. I like my eggs cooked so they are only slightly less chewy than rubber. The peppers in the frittata are wet, and they made the eggs kind of, well, wet. A minor thing, I know, but it was enough to make me not want to eat more than a few bites. The flavor was good, I just didn’t like the texture.