Category: Vegetables

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The Book Vegetables

196. Sautéed Kale with Bacon and Vinegar p.541


The recipe

The Book has got quite a few recipes that follow the [bitter green] + [cured pork] + [some acid] = [delicious] formula. In this case the bitter green is played by kale, cured pork by our perenial favourite: bacon, and cider vinegar is taking on the role of acid. You simmer the kale for a few minutes while crisping the bacon in a pan. After pouring off most of the bacon fat, you add the drained kale to the bacon, and sautée for a couple of minutes. Once it’s off the heat it gets a quick spash of cider vinegar, and it’s time to eat.

The Good: We eat a lot of bitter greens, and this variation on the theme is one of the better ones. Kale is particularly nice because it retains a lovely bright colour even when it’s cooked. The bacons smokey sweet and salty fattiness plays perfectly witht the bitter turnipy kale. The sweetness and acidity of the cider vinegar tie it all together nicely. This dish takes about seven minutes to make, and it tastes wonderful.

The Bad: There’s not much bad to say about such a classic combination. It works. Bitter green haters have aready stopped reading this post, so no need to pander to them. The only reservation I’d have about serving this is if the other items on the menu were very mildly flavoured. This dish packs a big punch, so pair food accordingly.

The Verdict: This is a winner. We eat some varition on this formula frequently. Our doctors tell us to eat more bitter greens, and this makes doing so a pleasure. Sure, it involves bacon, but it’s mostly used as a flavouring agent. You don’t need to add salt, because it’s right there in your bacon, oil? nope also brought to you by the joy of bacon. This simple unfussy standby dish, and the many others like it, have a special place in my heart.

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The Book Vegetables

194. Pommes Anna p.571


The recipe
This is a ridiculously simple dish, but I still managed to mess it up. It should have been the centerpiece of our meal, but thanks to me it was just an exercise in missed potential. There are only two real ingredients, potatoes and butter, seasoned with salt and pepper. You slice the potatoes on a mandolin as thinly as possible, soak the slices in cold water, then pat them dry. The slices are layered in a buttered ovenproof skillet, and the layers are drizzed with  melted butter, and seasoned. Once all the layers are down the potatoes are covered with a buttered foil disk for the first half of baking, and are uncovered for the final half. When they they’re a gorgeous golden brown you take them out, invert the cake onto a serving dish and cut it into wedges.

The Good: I’ve had pommes anna before, and I can assure that they are very very good, anything wth 1 1/2 sticks of butter to 1 1/2 pounds of potatoes will necessarily be decadent. This is one of those dishes that you can’t help but doing a Julia Child impression while assembling. If it’s done right the potatoes are creamy with just the slightest bit of resistance left to them, it’s almost a confit de pommes de terre. All of the exterior surfaces are browned and crisp like the best potato chip you’ve ever had. It’s a truly decadent dish, and you can’t help but smile when you eat it.

The Bad: My pommes anna were nothing like the ideal I just set out. I followed all the steps correctly, right up until the bit where you take them out of the oven once the’re golden and crisp. I forgot about them for another twenty minutes to half an hour, and they had basically devolved into overcooked potato chips. There was enough butter there to keep it from actually burning, it just tasted very very deeply browned. You might say that potato chips made with butter have something going for them, and honestly it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t at all what the recipe was going for.

A huge part of this was my fault, but I was a little surprised at how thinly layered the potatoes were in the first place. The linked recipe calls for a nine inch pan, but The Book’s version spreads the same amount of potato out in a 10 inch pan. Such a thin layer of potatoes is more susceptible to burning, and even at its intended non-dehydrated thickness there wouldn’t have been enough delicious creamy centre to really satisfy me. Yes, the crunchy exterior is everyone’s favorite part, but it’s only special when it’s in ballance with a fair bit of middle. In future I’d consider going even smaller, think 8 inches, to get a satisfyingly thick stack of potatoes.

The Verdict: It’s hard to rate recipes when they’re my failures and not the book’s. The dish I produced wouldn’t early more than a 2, but I think the recipe as written has the potential for greatness. I’m a vindictive guy, so I’m only going to give them a 3.5, but done right they might be a five.

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The Book Vegetables

193. Beets with Lime Butter p.523


The recipe

This was a very simple, and highly effective preparation for beets. My dining companion is mildly obsessed with beets, and we certainly eat more of them than the average couple. We tend to stick to Ukrainian, or Eastern European preparations, or pair them with goat cheese in salads. This week a friend brought an Egyptian preparation of beets in Mediterranean yogurt to a pot luck which was just delicious. We’d never considered trying this recipe’s method before, but I think we will again. The beets are shredded, simply sautéed in butter with lime zest, then tossed with a little more butter, lime juice, salt, and pepper, and served with chopped scallions.

The Good: This was remarkably simple, and unexpected. Beets don’t make me think of limes. Beets and some type of acid makes perfect sense, but limes have got such a particular tropical floral scent that I’d just never considered them working with beets. In the end the sweetness of the limes and of the beets played very well off each other. There was just enough butter to make this dish cravable, but it remained quite light, and although my picture doesn’t really do it justice it was a very striking dish. I was very pleased that this took all of fifteen minutes to make.

The Bad: I have nothing bad to say about the final dish. It was simple, satisfying, and very tasty. The only downside to the preparation is that grated beets tend to stain. Beet juice comes off counter and floors nicely, but clothes can be a bit of a problem. I would also recommend using a plastic cutting board. It’s actually a good check to see if your cutting board is getting too old and scarred, the beet juice will rinse right off the surface, but any deep groves will be stained purple.

The Verdict: We’re fond of beets and serve them to all comers at our house. We’ve had several guests who were kind of tentative about beet eating when they arrived, but most of them have become converts. If beets aren’t one of your pantry staples this is a nice introduction. I thought it was a bright, fresh, and wholesome, take on one of our favourite vegetables.

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The Book Vegetables

192. Baked Breaded Acorn Squash p.579


The recipe

Here’s a very simple and quite cool looking preparation for acorn squash. All you do is mix bread crumbs, thyme, salt, and pepper in a bowl. Melt butter in another bowl, and dip slices of acorn squash first into the butter, then coat with the bread crumb mixture. You then bake the squash slices for about 20 minutes.

The Good: I wouldn’t have guessed that acorn squash and thyme had such an affinity for one another, that was a very pleasant surprise indeed. Baked bread crumb toppings are generally good things, and this was no exception.

The Bad: I didn’t have any regular bread crumbs, and decided panko would be an acceptable substitute. I didn’t consider that because panko is so much lighter and has much more surface area than regular dry bread crumbs, it cooked much faster. When the recipes recommended 20 minutes in the over were up my bread crumbs were starting to burn so I had no choice but to pull the squash out. Unfortunately the interiors of the squash were still quite firm. I had to nuke the squash to get it to soften up. The bread crumb topping survived the trip through the microwave better than I would have expected though.

The Verdict: While the panko substitution was my fault, the cooking time for this recipe was too short, and that’s The Book’s fault. The flavours were excellent, and it was a very simple way to make an impressive looking side dish. I’ll certainly be making this again, but I’ll stick a little closer to the instructions next time.

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The Book Vegetables

188. Crisp Sautéed Cabbage with Caraway p.527

The recipe does not appear to appear online

You know how it goes. You get ambitious and decide to make coleslaw for that barbecue you’re hosting, and think that you should buy a big cabbage because so many are coming to this to-do. You get home and start slicing the cabbage only to discover that half of it fills the biggest bowl in the house, so the remainder goes into the crisper to quietly decompose until you can feel good about throwing it away. This recipe is the solution to your cabbage problem.

The Good: This recipe takes 20 minutes start to finish, and it gets rid of that cabbage. Slicing the cabbage very finely (use a mandolin if you have one) and sautéing it quickly doesn’t give it time to develop that sulpherous stink most people would rather avoid. It’s cooked with onion, caraway seeds, salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lemon juice at the end. The carraway worked really nicely with the cabbage, it’s not a spice I think of using often, and I like to see it on things other than bread. My dining companion really liked this dish a lot, it appealed to her Ukranian roots, and I have to agree. An underappreciated virtue of cabbage is that it’s exceedingly inexpensive. What with the price of food these days, why not integrate more cabbage into your diet and save your shekels.

The Bad: There weren’t many bad points about this recipe, it’s very simple, with no surprises. The world is full of reflexive cabbage haters, if you’re one of them this dish won’t change your mind, but for the rest of us I thought it was a winner. It could have used some colour though, shredded carrot comes to mind.

The Verdict: This is a recipe I’d be willing to go out and buy a brand new cabbage for. It’s got a definite place on the menu at our next pierogi party (we probably have three a year, not counting the nights we just have them for dinner). I wasn’t expecting much from such a simple recipe, but it really worked for me.

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The Book Vegetables

187. Roasted Spiced Sweet Potatoes p.584

The recipe

I served these sweet potatoes along with Lillie’s North Carolina Chopped Barbecue , and they were a lovely accompaniment. I should have though about the colour palate of our dinner before pairing sweet potatoes and barbecue, the plate was a little orange. You may eat with your eyes first, but the important bit is what happens when you put it in your mouth. On that score these potatoes did very well.

The Good: These sweet potatoes are delicious, simple, and in most other contexts very good looking. A child could make them, you just cut sweet potatoes into wedges, toss with ground coriander, fennel, oregano, red pepper flakes, kosher salt, and oil, and roast for 40ish minutes. It’s an unusual combination of spices, but they worked unexpectedly well together.

The Bad: Wedges are a popular food shape because they’re easy to cut, but they cook very unevenly. The thin edges of the sweet potatoes started to dry out before the interiors fully cooked. This was less of a problem with smaller sweet potatoes, but with any bigger onces I’d try a more uniform shape. I’d consider using a baking sheet you don’t like much for this dish because there was a lot of burned on spices and oil that were difficult to get off.

The Verdict: This recipe was a winner, it was simple, delicious, and took less than ten minutes of my time. Roasted sweet potatoes are always a treat, I love how the exterior puffs up and blisters while the interior melts into a decadent mash. The spice mixture was very present, but didn’t overwhelm the natural goodness of the sweet potatoes. These would be good any time of the year, but I think they’d be exceptional as part of a not-so-traditional Thanksgiving. My Dad loves to scandalize the family by messing with classic Thanksgiving dishes, and this recipe would really fit the bill.

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The Book Vegetables

156. Dry-Cooked String Beans p.523


I couldn’t find a recipe for this one online.

I was in a frying mood the night I made these beans and the onion rings. The combination of a fried appetizer, and a fried main course was just a little too much. This stir fry was more than greasy enough all by itself.

In this dish trimmed green beans are deep fried in a wok for 30 seconds, then drained. You then drain off most of the oil, and build a stir fry starting with garlic, red pepper flakes, and ginger, then add ground pork. Once the pork is browned the beans go back in to reheat. A mixture of sugar, salt, soy sauce, sake, and sesame oil is then poured over top along with a handful of scallion greens and stirred to coat. Put this on a bed of sticky rice and you’ve got dinner.

The stir fry itself was totally delicious, it was an excellent balance of ingredients, just spicy enough, and wonderfully complex and arromatic. However, the stir fried beans were a bit weird and greasy. I trimmed the ends of the beans, so there was an open tube down the middle of them. Some of those tubes filled with oil during frying, and made the dish much greasier than I would have liked. It’s possible that my oil temperature dropped too far, and the pressure of escaping steam wasn’t enough to keep the oil out. If so, more oil, or smaller batches of beans would have taken care of the problem. The recipe says that the point of the deep frying is to lock in the coulour of the beans, but blanching, and shocking them would have done the same thing. The exterior of the beans took on a funny wrinkled texture, but they remained firm and crisp, and nicely green.

I’d happily make an adapted version of this recipe, but I think the deep fried green beans are better left behind. There are lots of recipes for dry-cooked beans out there, so I’ll presume it’s a well respected technique, and suggesting that they kind of suck is probably insulting someone’s Grandmother’s cooking, but they just weren’t my bag. The rest of the dish was excellent, and simply replacing the frying for a blanching would probably solve my only criticism of the recipe. If it had been less oily, it would have earned 4.5 mushrooms, but as it is, I can’t give it more than three.

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The Book Vegetables

155. Fried Onion Rings p.552


I can’t find the recipe for this one online.

Way back in the beginning of The Project, I mentioned that I’ve been a little gun shy about deep frying in my kitchen ever since I put some very wet potato wedges into a pot of massively overheated oil and turned my stove into a fireball. I try to do most of my frying outside on the barbecue’s side burner instead. The thought of raining fiery death upon the downstairs neighbors innocently sitting on their balconies hardly bothers me at all. It has the additional advantage of not stinking up the whole house. I take as many of my stinky cooking projects outside as I can, the hipsters next door may not appreciate it, but keeping my dining companion happy is much more important.

I’ve never made onion rings before, but I’ve eaten my fair share. I like rings with a thin crisp coating of batter, that stays attached to the onion that it doesn’t slither out along with your first bite. The batter should be flavourful on it’s own, but not excessively seasoned. Simplicity is a good thing, but these rings may have been a bit too simple. The recipe calls for sliced onions to be dipped in milk, and dredged in flour and salt, then fried at 370F for a couple of minutes. They passed the thin, crisp, and well attached to the onions test, but they were a little lacking in the flavour department.

I appreciate the minimalism of the recipe, lots of other onion rings recipes call for eggs, baking soda, cornmeal, bread crumbs, and other nonsense. A simple mixture of flour, salt, and a liquid should be quite sufficient. I would have preferred the liquid to be beer however. Using milk is nice, because you don’t have to wait for the beer to go flat before using the batter, but beer tastes so much better, and onion rings just don’t say dairy to me. I would have also preferred a little more salt mixed into the flour. Obviously you can add salt later, but it’s better when it’s in the batter. In fact, a batter would have been nice too. In this version you dip the onions in milk, dredge them in flour, dip them in milk again, then once more into the flour. It was a bit of an operation to do the double dredge, and it made a mess. Just mixing up a batter of the right consistency and sticking the rings in there wouldn’t be any harder, and it would be a lot faster.

I love that this recipe is in the vegetables section of the book. Finally my nine-year-old self’s “Eat your vegetables”, “But mom, onion rings are a vegetable” logic is getting the respect it deserves. For a first attempt at making my own rings, I was reasonably pleased with these, they were golden, crisp, and quite tasty. These aren’t the ultimate rings, but refining my perfect recipe is going to be a fun process.

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The Book Vegetables

146. Sweet Potato Parsnip Purée p.584


The recipe

This dish seemed like a winner, but ended up a real disappointment. I’m a fan of sweet potatoes, and I adore parsnips, so what could possibly go wrong? It’s about a simple as a recipe can get, you just simmer chunks of sweet potato and parsnip ’till they’re tender, and run them through the food processor with butter, milk, brown sugar, salt, and pepper.

Looking at the recipe I thought the brown sugar would bring out the essence of the sweet potato and highlight some of its deeper flavours. I didn’t worry about extra sugar because the sharp turnipy bite of the parsnip would be there to pull the dish back from the saccharine edge. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The already sweet enough thank-you-very-much potatoes ended up cloying. The parsnips added a hint of a counterpoint, but not nearly enough, they did lend prominent overtones of bark and wood chips though. The recipe called for light brown sugar, which didn’t have enough molasses to do much for the flavour.

Probably the worst part of the recipe was the texture. The time in the food processor reduced this to a gummy coating paste. Every bite left me with the feeling of peanut butter glued to the roof of my mouth. I made the mistake of leaving some of the dishes for the morning, and the gunk in the food processor set up into a form of organic concrete. Add the weird, almost yellow, kinda orange, but definitely neon colour palate of this dish, and I was ready to be done with it.

I had half my portion on the night we made it, and tried to get through a bit more over the next couple days. Eventually I gave up and let it moulder in the fridge ’till I could throw it out in good conscience. Oddly, the Epicurious reviews for this recipe are fairly positive, so maybe I’m missing something. Mashed sweet potatoes are wonderful things, but from now on I’ll roast my parsnips and serve them along side.

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The Book Vegetables

137. Ratatouille p.586


The recipe

Everyone, or at least everyone who cares about food, has a stockpile of formative food memories, often centred on parents and grandparents doing things the way they’d always been done, or traveling experiences where the zeitgeist of your food universe is overturned by a brand new culture. The list of culinary luminaries who trace their food awakenings back to a summer trip to France is longer than I’d care to count. So it should come as no surprise that my thirteen year old self came home from a month long stay with a family near Lyons with a different perspective on food, and in particular ratatouille.

I don’t think I took nearly as much advantage of my time there as I should have, I mostly sulked, pittied myself, and felt homesick. I was an awful house guest, and I was convinced I was being punished. But, my hosts graciously put up with this insufferable Canadian brat, and exposed me to some wonderful things that I wasn’t ready to appreciate. Fifteen years later I can still taste most of the meals we ate, and the idea of staying in a four hundred year old farm house, surrounded by rolling pastures, creaky old barns, and tiny streams sounds wonderful. I wish I could go back and gather snails off the rocks in the field after a rain for escargot in garlic butter, and the weekly farmers market wouldn’t seem like the painful drudgery it did at the time. I owe that family a huge debt of gratitude, and an apology.

I did appreciate most of the food experiences at the time, the rich creamy yogurt was unlike anything I’d ever eaten, the impeccably cured sausages were a revelation, and of course the cheese. I also started to come around on very rare steak. The biggest change was the idea that vegetables could good enough to crave, and not just an afterthought to be gotten out of if at all possible. Ratatouille was the catalyst for that change. A nice older couple who had helped to organize my trip invited us over for lunch in the back garden, where we ate ratatouille, baguette, and nibbled on olives. At first I was puzzled by the lack of a meaty main course, but soon I couldn’t have cared less. The ratatouille was unbelievably good, and I just couldn’t understand why. My mother had made it before, and I was way to smart to fall for her hiding veggies in a stew trickery, so I turned my nose up at it. But this ratatouille was a completely different being, it was insanely flavourful, and multi layered with each element distinct, but contributing to the whole. There were tomatoes, garlic, peppers, onions, zucchini, eggplant, that were more fresh and explosively flavourful than I could ever have conceived of them being. That meal filled me with a sense of profound contentment, connectedness, and peace. Thinking back that euphoria probably had a lot more to do with the Champagne and Beaujolais they let me drink, but one way or another my perspective on ratatouille had been changed. I asked the old man what the secret was, and he told me about herbs de provence, so I brought a big bag home to try to get my mother to recreate it. Of course, my mother had herbs de provence, the secret was really in the incredible produce that went into the stew, and a lifetime spent honing the technique ’till his ratatouille was as good as it could be.

The Book’s ratatouille doesn’t live up to the old man’s, but it at least recalls it. The Book uses a very odd method, the recipe starts by making the tomato sauce with peeled (I didn’t bother) seeded and chopped tomatoes, sliced garlic, parsley, and basil leaves. While the sauce simmers, onions, bell peppers, zucchini, and eggplant are individually browned, then added to the tomato sauce and allowed to simmer for an hour. This batch browning of the veggies does a nice job building flavour, but it’s a huge pain, and it takes a whole whack of oil. I liked the added complexity, but there really was much more oil than necessary. I think you could get a similar effect by tossing the veggies with a more reasonable amount of oil and spreading them on cookie sheets and running them under the broiler for a few minutes. I was also surprised by the lack of herbs de provence, usually that herb blend is de rigueur for ratatouille. The basil only strategy turned out to be quite delicious, but I did miss the other flavours. My favorite ratatouilles have quite distinct chunks of vegetables, which retain some of their original texture, while softening into a cohesive blend with the others. Here, everything got a bit too soft, and I wonder if it wouldn’t have worked better to simmer it for less time, but let it sit in the fridge for a day or two before serving it.

I made this ratatouille twice within a few weeks. I was very well pleased with my first attempt, and decided to bring a second batch to a large family affair. The second attempt just didn’t live up to the first one, and I can’t explain why. The first batch went over pretty well with my dining companion, and some friends I served it to, but the second was largely ignored at dinner. That inconsistency is kind of worrying to me, I have no clue what factors I varied in my second attempt, but it just didn’t have that special something. My first try was very good, and could have been excellent with a few tweaks, however the inexplicably mediocre second attempt will keep me from giving this a great rating.