Tag: corriander

Categories
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.

Categories
Soups The Book

87. Tortilla Soup with Crisp Tortillas and Avocado Relish p.95

The recipe

This soup was a revelation for me. A few days ago I mentioned that I was falling for dried chiles this year. This dish was phase one of the seduction. In this recipe a pretty standard soup base (stock water, onion, tomato, garlic, oregano, salt and pepper) is transfigured into one of the more delicious things I’ve ever tasted with the addition of two ancho chiles, and two guajillos. The soup becomes rich and thick when corn toritllas are fried crisp, and crumbled into the soup. This dish would be delicious if you stopped here, but it gets so much better with the addition of the avocado relish. This relish is a much better guacamole than The Book’s official guacamole recipe, and it compliments the soup perfectly. Everything that is deep sultry and comforting and warm in the soup is bright, clean, shining and crisp in the relish. The soup has a satisfyingly hearty texture, which is mirrored in the relish. A few fried tortilla strips added just before serving give a nice crunchy counterpoint.

The recipe suggests that you fry your own corn tortillas, but as the tortilla place in my neighborhood does this on site I just bought a bag of their fresh made tortilla strips, and saved myself the trouble.

This recipe came together easily, and was completely delicious. I thought the final presentation was very attractive, and the dish just made me happy. This soup absolutely earned its five mushroom rating.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

76. Cilantro Walnut Filling p.420

The Recipe

This is the filling for Twenty-First Century Beef Wellington. The filling for Beef Wellington in the 19th and 20th centuries was a duxelles and paté de foie. It’s a very French preparation which was renamed and popularized by the British. This twenty-first century version has a lot more in common with Argentina than the old world. I tasted it and my first thought was chimichurri. It’s a preparation of blanched spinach, cilantro, parsley, chopped walnuts, garlic, honey, bread crumbs, egg whites, cumin, corriander, salt, and pepper. The whole thing goes into the food processor and pulsed until smooth.

As a filling for a dish called Beef Wellington it was fairly weird. As a sauce for roast beef tenderloin is wasn’t bad. I can’t get over the preconception of what goes into Beef Wellington. I understand and appreciate the need to play around with traditional dishes, to update them, to take a fresh look at what makes them good, and to help the dishes to evolve with our tastes. Maybe in the twenty-second century I’ll be ready for this filling, but to my palate Beef Wellington without mushrooms in some capacity just can’t be Beef Wellington.

I think I would have preferred to leave the walnuts and cumin out of this filling. Without them it would have been a nice pesto, and might have worked better in the dish. Replacing the walnuts with pine nuts (another pesto classic) would work well too. The walnuts were toasted, and chopped fine in the food processor. This gave them kind of a mealy texture that didn’t really break down into a paste, and didn’t retain much crunch. I also wasn’t crazy about the flavour of the walnuts with the cilantro. The cumin was a distracting touch, that I didn’t think was particularly necessary.

I think a variation on this filling served over a grilled steak would work quite well. It doesn’t stand a chance as a replacement for duxelles in my heart. I give them credit for trying to cut the calorie count of the Beef Wellington, but this isn’t an adequate substitute. I’ll give it a three mushroom rating as a pesto, but as a filling for Beef Wellington it wouldn’t merit more than a two.

Categories
Poultry The Book

52. Corriander and Mustard Seed Chicken p.367

the recipe

I made this dish for friends in Brooklyn. I chose it because it looked simple, and didn’t seem to call for any hard to find ingredients, so I was fairly confident I could make it in an unfamiliar kitchen. Unfortunately I struck out looking for whole mustard and coriander seeds at the mega mart. I’m sure I was within a six block radius of some really great food shops, but I had no clue where they were. If I’d thought ahead I would have picked things up at Zabar’s that morning, but I didn’t so I had to make do with powdered mustard, and ground coriander. That meant that amounts I used were guesswork, and the texture of the sauce was quite different from the intended result. Powdered mustard can’t hold a candle to the flavour of whole mustard seed either.

In this dish the chicken legs are browned, and the sauce / poaching liquid of shallots, wine, water, and the seeds is built in the pan. The chicken is added back in and cooked through, then apple jelly and fresh cilantro are whisked into the sauce. The jelly did a good job of balancing the bitter / sour flavours of the mustard and coriander, but the sauce could have been thickened or reduced before serving.

My main issue with the recipe was the chicken skin. The legs are well browned and the skin contributes flavour, but then they’re poached and the lovely crispy skin gets water logged and washed out. I didn’t find the skin very appealing in the final dish, and I think if I were to make it again I’d remove the skin before browning. If the final texture of the skin is unappetizing, and all it’s doing is adding fat to the dish, why not remove it?

Overall, it was simple to prepare, and relied on easy to find ingredients and pantry staples (despite my particular issues). The flavours in the sauce worked really well together, and they penetrated the chicken during the poaching. Using skinless legs, and thickening the sauce would have made a world of difference. Using whole seeds instead of ground would have been even better. In the end it was good but not spectacular, some of that was my fault, and some of it was The Book’s.