I made this recipe for Moroccan Raw Carrot Salad from page 94 of Olive Trees and Honey for our Passover Seder. The recipe calls for chili paste, minced green chilies, or cayenne. I used two sprinkles of cayenne. The dish was okay but was too spicy for everyone. I’m not sure the issue was that the levels were too spicy. I think it was more that we just didn’t like the combination of a raw carrot salad with spicy cayenne. The dish didn’t get finished.
I had purchased sweet potatoes for another recipe and then decided I wasn’t in the mood for it. Since sweet potatoes are native to the Americas and the Caribbean, I thought it would be interesting to try making a recipe from the Caribbean. I’ve never tried cooking Trinidadian food, but there’s a Trinidadian restaurant in D.C. called Crown Bakery that I was introduced to by some Trinidadian coworkers. It was one of the most delicious places I’ve ever eaten and long after I stopped working at that job, I continued going back for doubles. Since I haven’t historically found I much enjoyed other Caribbean dishes, Trinidad seemed like a good place to start my Carribean cooking journey.
I found this recipe for Trinidadian Sweet Potato Fritters in a Callaloo Sauce. The spinach (aka: callaloo) is blended in a coconut sauce. The sweet potatoes are roasted before being combined into the patty mixture and then pan fried. The recipe wasn’t super well written and required some interpetation. The ingredient list included “1 green”. I left out the scotch bonnets since I’m trying to avoid spicy foods. I kept the uncoooked patty mixture in the fridge and just fried the number of patties I wanted to eat with each meal.
I really enjoyed the dish the first night I ate it but less and less as the week went on. I found myself having to make myself eat it instead of something else. The sauce has a very interesting flavor to it, but it’s not one I wanted to eat all week long. I didn’t love the flavor of the fritters. That’s not surprising since sweet potatoes are one of my less favorite vegetables. I also thought the fritters needed something else to hold them together. All in all, you’ll probably really enjoy this if you generally enjoy the flavors and ingredients in the dish. But I don’t think it’s the dish to convert anyone who doesn’t already love sweet potatoes and Carribbean flavors. Although, maybe with the scotch bonnet the dish might have changed.
I love a sweet and savory salad combo. And I love fennel. So when someone gifted me Love Real Food, this was the first recipe I tried. I honestly wasn’t that excited by the cookbook, but was most inspired by this recipe. Despite all the yummy ingredients, I found this really underwhelming. It was actually pretty bland and the dried cherries were too sweet. Between my unexcited reaction to the recipes in the book and this disappointment, I ended up leaving this book on the shelf for several years before trying a cookie recipe from it this past week.
I had half of a head of Chinese cabbage left over from another recipe and was looking for something interesting to do with it. I found this recipe for Chinese Cabbage Salad with Orange and Tahini Dressing on page 80 of the Tassajara Cookbook. The recipe was easy enough to make. My only problem was that the tahini clumped and didn’t blend well with the rest of the dressing. I think using a submersion blender would have solved this problem.
I didn’t love this recipe. I liked the combination of cabbage and orange, but the tahini dressing just kind of muted the flavors of the salad. The whole thing was kind of bland and unexciting.
My sister has been raving for years about her okonomiyaki recipe as an easy tasty weeknight dinner. Apparently okonomyaki is a Japanese cabbage pancake. It really never sounded that good to me. But I recently found myself with a bunch of Chinese cabbage so I decided to try making it. Instead of my sister’s recipe, which has high fodmap leeks, I found a New York Times recipe. It was super easy to make, but I didn’t like it. When I made it the way instructed, half the recipe cooked on medium-low for 8 minutes on each side, it came out mushy and uncooked. I added another egg to the second half and cooked a quarter of the recipe at a time. With the extra egg and the thinner pancake, I was able to get it to cook through. But it was way oversalted and basically about as tasty as I thought a cabbage pancake would be. I think I’ll go back to not making okonomiyaki. This one isn’t for me.
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1020099-green-okonomiyaki
I’ve recently started getting the courage to experiment a bit with eating low fodmap beans, after avoiding them for the past 6 months. According to Monash University, people eating low fodmap can actually handle a small serving of edamame. This recipe for rice cake soup with bok choy and edamame was my first foray into eating edamame again. The recipe calls for asian rice cakes, which are squishy and can be found in the refrigerator aisle of Asian grocery stores. Very different than the crunchy American rice cake. I’d never heard of these before, but found them easily enough at my Asian market.
The recipe says that the boiled cakes will make the broth creamy. My broth was a little creamy, but not as much as shown in the picture on the New York times site. I cooked the leek whites in the oil and tossed them out, then used the greens in the soup.
One thing I learned is that these cakes don’t really work if you cook like I do, cook once and eat leftovers all week. The cakes absorbed most of the broth and the next day I no longer had soup. I wasn’t crazy about the flavors in this recipe. Still, this recipe might be a lot better if you use leek whites instead of leek greens, so I’ll reserve judgement. I did like the texture of the cakes. I enjoy gummy foods. If you don’t, these aren’t for you. I’m going to tr yto find another recipe to use the rest of the cakes left in my fridge.
Carrots and oatmeal are great low fodmap sources of soluble fiber. I was trying to find ways to increase soluble fiber intake and wanted to make a lowfat dessert. These cookies seemed to fit nicely. The recipe is really easy to make. I used a whole egg instead of egg whites.
I liked the cookies when they first came out of the oven, and they were good enough the next day. But as the days went on, I found myself not wanting to eat them. They were too dense, too cakey and not sweet enough. They weren’t terrible, but I won’t make these again.
Since my only bean intake right now is fermented soy, I’ve been eating a lot of tofu and tempeh. I’ve also had a late summer glut of tomatoes and summer squash and have been pretty low energy as well. So this super simple recipe for tempeh sauteed and cooked with tomatoes and summer squash from Isa Does It, seemed like a perfect choice.
I left out the red pepper flakes since I’m avoiding spicy foods at the moment. Beware, only at the end of the recipe does it tell you to serve over mashed potatoes or polenta. I wasn’t prepared for this and had to rustle up some mashed potatoes at the last minute.
Overall, this was a bit of disappointment. The veggies tasted great. Simple and refreshing. Ian stated them and asked me to make a version without onions or tempeh for him. But frying the tempeh was bland and overpowering. I don’t think I’d make this again, but if I do I’ll experiment with adding a rub or some other seasoning for the tempeh.
It’s cherry tomato season in my garden. So when I saw this recipe in the New York times for a cold noodle soup with oodles of cherry tomatoes, I was intrigued. I added marinated Asian tofu from Veganomicon to add some protein.
The soup was very easy to make, but underwhelming. I didn’t like the flavor of the broth, though I couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong with it. I won’t make this again.
I love eggplant Parmesan. I usually make my mother’s vegan version of the recipe. But I felt like trying something new, so I tried a recipe I found on the ny times. I used vegan Parmesan, which worked well. But the recipe had issues. The big issue was that there just wasn’t enough sauce. It calls for 1 28 ounce can of tomatoes. I think it probably needs 1.5x or 2x that. The other issue was that the eggplant didn’t get cooked all the way through, but since my oven is broken, I’m not going to blame the recipe for this. I was able to fix it by pouring tomato sauce over the dish, covering it, and cooking it on the stove until it was cooked through. It made a little mess, but was quite yummy. I honestly think I could make eggplant parmesan without using the oven. And since I really try not to use my oven in he summer, that is quite an appealing prospect. I’m going to try it an report back. I also want to experiment with a gluten free replacement for the breadcrumbs. Lots to try.
Nimble Veggies 