Day 135 - Porcini-Wild Rice Soup, Mediterranean-Style Baked Lima Beans, and Whole Wheat Soda Bread with Millet and Currants

This was a banner day! I have to confess, I've been feeling a little ambivalent about this project. Yes, there have been major hits, but there have been misses too. Some I take full responsibility for, and some I blame on sloppy editing or merely tastes that don't line up with mine. But today... today was a game changer. I am reinspired!


First, I had Ryan over for some bread tasting (and home improvements). And then Marcy came for dinner. Double whammy!


Whole Wheat Soda Bread with Millet and Currants 

I do love a good soda bread, although I was skeptical that one could achieve a decent result with no buttermilk or cream. I also enjoy millet in baked goods. And currants. So this recipe held promise.

You'll want to start the millet cooking process well in advance of baking because it does take a while for the millet to cool down to room temperature, partially covered.

Once the millet is ready, the assembling of the ingredients is pretty simple and straightforward. I got my pastry cutter out again, and this time, I resisted mincing it to death. I went ahead and used a cake pan, although the instructions for using a cast iron pot intrigued me.

Confession: I had a lot going on while I was making this, and I missed a big step: the brushing of the top with soy milk, before and during baking. While I'm sure the top of the bread would have had a nice gloss, vs. the matte version you see pictured here, I'd like to believe there was no sacrifice in flavor or texture of the bread itself.

As for the end result, it was excellent! Possibly even an improvement on previous traditional (read "non vegan") soda breads. While a dry, crumbly soda bread might be the norm, I welcomed the moistness of this one. It was full of flavor and had a great texture, and dairy was not missed at all! Great recipe!

SFO: 10

Porcini-Wild Rice Soup

First of all, I would like it to be known that I did go on a mission for fresh chervil for the garnish for this soup, and I came up short. I have come across chervil in local markets on occasion, but the couple of times I've gone looking for it, no such luck. Ah well, parsley it is.

This is a terrific soup recipe, enhanced by my newfound favorite commercial vegetable broth, namely Whole Foods 365 Organic. This doesn't really make sense, but the end result of this recipe is a soup that can only be described as beefy. Crazy, right? I guess it's all that umami-ness in the porcini mushrooms. This soup tasted so complex and fabulous that we couldn't believe our taste buds! That last flash of grated carrots is a really nice touch. I've never seen that before. I like!

SFO: 10+
This gets a plus because it's a vegan soup that is completely convincing as beef-based.


Mediterranean-Style Baked Lima Beans

Lima beans are the main cause of my childhood bean-o-phobia (first runner up being baked beans), so I haven't been excited about the lima bean recipes. But I know Marcy has a special fondness for Gigantes, which are gigantic lima beans cooked in this traditionally Greek way, so I figured now is just as good a time as any to get this first lima bean recipe out of the way.

Cut to... 

Oh! My! God! This is possibly my favorite recipe in the book so far! 

First of all, the beans. I purchased a plain old bag of Goya-brand Large Lima Beans, and I wondered if they'd be the right ones because they just don't look that big in the bag. But after a night of soaking, they are appropriately gigante. And once cooked, they hold their shape beautifully. I didn't taste one before adding them to the sauce and baking them, but in the end, they taste AMAZING! Almost sweet! I'm hooked!!

And then, the sauce. Quite a few components to manage, but the extra work is so worth it. The sauce is perfection. Salty, tangy, unctuous, herby, slightly sweet. Heaven!

I really can't say enough about this recipe - it is magical!

SFO: 10
This is a perfect way to erase any "lima bean baggage" (as I+T have named it). Irresistible.

Day 91 - Homemade Vegetable Broth, Broccoli-Potato Soup with Fresh Herbs, Sweet Basil Pesto Tapenade, and Fresh Rosemary Focaccia

Homemade Vegetable Broth

Well, it's about time I made this recipe, after all my griping about the taste of commercial vegetable broth. And what is there to say? Of course, it's a million times better than that other stuff, which is so, I don't know, tomato-y? Heavy. Fake-tasting. This stuff tastes fo real.

And yet, it's awfully sweet. I wonder if some of the suggested optional add ins, like bay leaves and peppercorns, might have mitigated some of that sweetness.

I ended up with about 6 cups of broth, which means there was quite a bit of evaporation, considering I started out with 9 cups of water. Those 6 cups were chock full of flavor, with a rich medium brown color, not the orange of store-bought veg stock. (see photo) 

Someday, when I'm a real cook, I'll make homemade vegetable broth all the time. But for now, I might just lean on those handy little bouillon cubes. They may not have all the delicious depth of this broth, but they also don't have the tomato-y-ness of the packaged broth, and they get the job done....

SFO: 10


Broccoli-Potato Soup with Fresh Herbs

I know Marcy's a sucker for potatoes, so this soup seems right up her alley.

Here's another easy soup that's big on flavor. Yes, Broccoli and Potato get top billing, but the Herbs are the real stars here.

When I start the soup, I'm smelling smells and thinking, "That tarragon is going to be very dominant!" But then I add my flavorful and sweet veggie broth (yup, all 6 cups), then the potatoes and then the broccoli, and once that's cooked, the tarragon had found its place.

But wait, it's not over! A fistful of fresh mint and then another one of dill get thrown in at the last minute! It's pretty startling the difference this makes. Well, I should qualify that: the mint sort of settles into the background. In fact, I couldn't really distinguish it. But the dill becomes the MVP in those last five seconds!


Unfortunately for me, I'm not a dill fan, so this was a turn for the worse for me, but I think for all you dill lovers out there, this will be very happy-making. 

My aversion to dill aside, this recipe is solid. It's a yummy, creamy, chunky bowl of herby goodness.

SFO: 10


Sweet Basil Pesto Tapenade

Wow. I don't know what to say. This is probably the first recipe in the book that left me scratching my head. And scraping my tongue. 

There must be a misprint in the ingredients for this recipe because it tastes so crazy to me, I'm thinking it can't be the authors' true intent. 

The recipe starts out very straightforward: basil, walnuts and garlic, chopped in the food processor. Then olive and walnut oils, grated lemon zest, salt and pepper... and maple syrup?? OK, maybe a tiny splash, for that "lightly sweetened" taste. But there's 1/3C of maple syrup in here! That amount tips this over into dessert. It's super sweet... and super salty at the same time. And I usually love the salty-sweet combo, but here, it just tastes crazy. KA-RA-ZY!

Marcy and I stared at each other upon tasting it, speechless.

If you dare to try this, I recommend starting out with 2T of maple syrup and then see if you want any more. I'm guessing 2T would be plenty.

SFO: 0
(not safe for anyone, as written)


Fresh Rosemary Focaccia

In my culinary adventures, I've done my share of bread baking. Yeasted breads, I mean. And I've learned some good tips along the way. So when I read this recipe, I found it very confronting. There were so many things I knew would lead to certain unwanted results.... Do I make the adjustments to get the results I know I'd prefer? Or do I follow it to the letter?

Since this exercise is to cook every recipe as designed, I did just that. (With one exception: I used my mixer to knead the dough.)

FYI, I went with my typical 50/50 white and whole wheat flour split.

The first fork in the road that I struggled with: I wanted to combine all of the ingredients minus the salt, which I know prohibits autolysis, and then let the dough sit for the 20m autolyse process. But no, I added everything and kneaded. (Incidentally, the salt is left out of the recipe directions, but I'm assuming they must expect us to add it with everything else.)

Next, cover with a dish towel. Hmm. I wanted so badly to cover with plastic wrap, as every other bread recipe I've ever made has instructed, but I did as told. Result? A not very well risen dough ball with a dried out exterior. :-(

I let the dough rise for an extra 10 or 15 minutes, to see if it would rise a little more, but there wasn't much change, so I proceeded. I've never punched down or rolled out focaccia dough, but that's what I&T told me to do, so punch and roll I did.

The final fork, sprinkle with salt and rosemary leaves first, THEN brush with oil? I just couldn't follow that one, because I'd be brushing all the salt and rosemary right off! So I brushed with oil, then I sprinkled the salt and leaves, then I sprayed more oil, just in case there's a reason to want oil on top. (Never too much oil in focaccia!) And I couldn't bear to lay a dishtowel over that oily dough! It'd absorb it all! So I put my foot down and used my trusty plastic wrap.

OK, I guess I did veer away from the recipe a teensy bit at the end, but so much less than I longed to!

In the oven, the bread's rise was rather impressive. Perhaps the short rise time leading up to being baked accounts for the big oven growth.

And the bread turns out fine. I just think focaccia here is a misnomer. This bread tastes strangely like a quick bread, with a very soft crumb and crust. Well, in fact, it IS a quick bread! A yeasted quick bread. The more authentic focaccias (focacce?) I've made not only have risen for twice as long, but also they've included a sponge/starter, developed overnight at a minimum, so these two processes are incomparable. As are the results.

Is this loaf edible? Tasty, even? 
Absolutely. 

Is it cute? 
See for yourself. 
  
Is it focaccia? 
I don't think so....

SFO: 10
(just call it something else... Fauxcaccia?)

Day 21 - Roasted Red Pepper Hummus, Poppy Seed-Cornmeal Roti, Mashed Spiced Sweet Potatoes, and Holiday Cranberry Sauce

Tonight was Book Club, aka Jeff's Book and Cook Club. See, after I cooked my way through Martha's book, I missed the constant dinner parties and entertaining, so I invited a bunch of friends to be a part of a book club for which I would provide meals inspired by whatever we just read. And here we are over two years later, celebrating our 18th selection/dinner together. 

Notice I didn't say "book" in that last sentence, because tonight was a Wild Card dinner. After every eighth book, we have a Wild Card selection, i.e. something that doesn't fall into one of the categories we regularly cycle through, namely: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Epic (anything over 500 pages), and Classic (anything published before 1965). For example, our first Wild Card entailed reading a month's worth of The New Yorker. Tonight's Wild Card selection entailed watching four specific Woody Allen movies. 

I know, I know, it's not a book. It's not even a magazine. It didn't involve reading in any shape or form, but it was what the group voted for, so tonight we had Chez Woody with a meal inspired by those four movies. It was a decidedly un-vegan meal, but I did manage to incorporate four recipes from the book!

Our cocktail hour brought The Annie Hall-way of Finger Foods, mostly non-vegan selections, descriptions of which I will spare you, but I did include what I called Self-Hatred Hummus, as a nod to Woody's line in the film that sums up his basic ideology: "I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member."

Roasted Red Pepper Hummus

I hate bell peppers. Unless I'm forgetting something, they're the only food I absolutely despise. I can smell, taste, sense them a mile away. If a pepper passes over a pot while it's cooking, the whole dish is tainted for me. It's not just a taste thing, it's also an indigestion thing: bell pepper is the awful taste that keeps on giving.

And if you know anything about this book, you know that it is positively RIDDLED with bell peppers. So how am I going to handle this? Like any good, self-hating, rule-following Jew, I'm going to prepare all the recipes verbatim, even those with the dreaded peppers. Hopefully, there will be people around me to enjoy them. I will taste everything, but chances are 99.9% that anything with peppers will not get a second bite from me. (FYI, this doesn't apply to jalapeño or serrano or any chile peppers. Those I'll eat.)

That's why I dubbed this dip Self-Hatred Hummus. Because I would never want to eat it. But other people did, and evidently it was fine. That's Adinah posing with it above.

SFO: 10

Poppy Seed-Cornmeal Roti

The first course was inspired by the film Crimes and Misdemeanors, which is a film almost completely devoid of food and food references. In one scene, Woody and Mia are eating take-out Indian, and he jokes, "How's the Tandoori Mouse?" So in a desperation move, I went Indian for this course. I made this Carrot Pachadi recipe and served it with the Poppy Seed-Cornmeal Roti.

Poppy Seed-Cornmeal Roti is the recipe that ate my afternoon. It's not that it's so hard, it's just time-consuming. I hadn't done the math, but if you're making ten of something that needs to be cooked for 3-4 minutes on both sides, that's 60-80 minutes of cooking time! And that doesn't even include the painstaking process of brushing and folding and sprinkling of crumbs and multiple rollings that these require. Oy.

And to add insult to injury, after all that work, I think I must have made one or more very big mistakes here. While the flavors were really nice (though could've been saltier... I know, broken record), the rotis were tough and dried out, not even remotely "soft, flaky, buttery" as described.
 
Here are my guesses for where the bad turn happened: 1) I rolled them too thin. 2) My pan was too hot. 3) I didn't wrap them or reheat them well. 4) I over-kneaded them to begin with. 5) I increased the recipe by 50%.

1) I saw the instruction to roll into "as thin a circle as possible" and went for it.
2) In retrospect, I realize I should've turned the flame down when I saw the big black spots forming on the breads. I mean, little black spots are good, but big ones? My bad.
3) I wrapped them in a damp dish towel as they were being made, and rewarmed them tightly wrapped in foil, all as directed, but I think the damage may have been done already.
4) I let my KitchenAid mixer knead for me (with the dough hook). And maybe I let it go on too long. 5-6 minutes of kneading by hand might not mean 5-6 minutes of machine kneading.
5) Upping the recipe by 50% should have set me up for 12 small rotis. What I got were 10 very large rotis. This makes me think #1 is at least one of the culprits.

Also, I assert that there's a typo in here.  It has to do with the oil. The recipe calls for 2 tablespoons in the crumbs part of the recipe, plus more for brushing. However, there is also an instruction in the recipe to coat the just-kneaded roti dough in a tablespoon of oil before it rests. I think that that tablespoon is meant to be factored into the 2 tablespoons that it appears are meant to go into the crumbs.

Here's the problem: when you add 2 tablespoons of oil to the crumbs ingredients, you don't get crumbs, you get paste. If it were 1 tablespoon to coat the dough ball, and 1 tablespoon for the crumbs, I think the crumbs would end up with the right, crumby consistency.

And should I even address the ludicrous "typo" that says these take 30 minutes? Simply cooking 8 rotis takes between 48-64 minutes, and that doesn't include assembling the ingredients (5m), kneading (5m), resting time (10m minimum), and rolling and folding and brushing and crumbling (1,000,000m). Even if you roll out the next roti while you're cooking the last one, you will need to set aside about an hour and a half for this recipe. Trust me.

As for the taste, delicious. Even tough and dried-out, my book club buddies enjoyed this. That's my cousin Harriet nibbling on one.

SFO: 10

(I'm not going to punish this recipe for my own mistakes. If made well, I'm sure anyone would be happy to eat them.)
 
Mashed Spiced Sweet Potatoes

The main course got its inspiration from Hannah and Her Sisters, which begins and ends with two consecutive Thanksgiving dinners. There's a no-brainer! 

Mashed sweet potatoes always have a place on the Thanksgiving table! As for I&T's take on them, it's easy, straightforward, traditional even. The only thing distinguishing these from your average Thanksgiving side dish is the absence of butter (enter vegetable oil). Very tasty, and a good candidate for making ahead. Reheats well.

SFO: 10 

(Even Tracy ate it!) 

Holiday Cranberry Sauce 

One of my favorite Thanksgiving ingredients is fresh cranberries. I was so excited to see that they were still available in the stores. I was curious to try this recipe because of the agar addition. I've never used a thickening agent for cranberry sauce, but it must be because there's more liquid (apple cider) and less sugar than your typical versions. 

Warning: watch this pot carefully! Evidently apple cider with agar in it really loves to boil over. It happened to me twice!

As for the taste, good. The apple cider doesn't change the flavor profile too much. The cranberries dominate. The agar doesn't seem to bind this a whole heck of a lot. It was soupier than my traditional version. Ultimately, not preferable, but fine. Annie liked it.

SFO: 10

(It's safe to serve to anyone, but I won't be using this recipe come Thanksgiving.)  

P.S. Dessert was a non-vegan French Apple Cake inspired by Midnight in Paris. I almost made the Apple Galettes from the book, but I thought it might be too much to take on....