Tag: olive oil

Categories
Salads The Book

201. Caesar Salad p.136

I can’t find the recipe online.

Caesar salad is pretty much always good. The only way to really truly mess it up is to use wilted, or flavorless lettuce. I’ve seen it done, I had a chicken Caesar at a Boston Pizza that was an insult to the whole concept of food, but generally they’re a safe bet, with a chance of being tasty. Growing up my dad made Caesar dressing regularly for a few years, then stopped despite our protests. He’ll make it very occasionally now, but I can’t get a straight answer as to why the Caesar train dried up. His Caesar was excellent, but my mother in law’s is among the best I’ve ever had, and she’s always happy to make one. She just sent me the recipe today, and we’ll be trying it out. I’ll let you know how mine works out in the comments. The Book’s recipe doesn’t hold a candle to either of those versions.

The recipe starts with making croûtons from firm white sandwich bread, toasting them for 10 minutes at 350, then tossing them with a mashed garlic, olive oil, and salt, then toasting for a few minutes more. The dressing is olive oil, egg yolks, lemon juice, white wine vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and minced and mashed anchovy. You toss romaine with the dressing, grate Parmigiano-Reggiano on top, and add the croûtons, along with salt and pepper, then toss again and serve.

The Good: The croûtons were very tasty indeed. 5 slices of bread worth of croûtons were tossed with 4 tablespoons of garlic oil, so each and every croûton got a good soaking of delicious delicious oil. I used nice crisp romaine hearts, and good cheese so we were well on our way to a very nice salad.

The Bad: The dressing for this salad was lackluster, in fact I probably wouldn’t have guessed that it was supposed to be a Caesar dressing. It was nearer to a vinaigrette tossed with a bunch of cheese. I think it’s a problem of technique, the recipe asks you to whisk together the oil, egg yolks, acids, and flavourings in a small bowl, in no specific order.  Those ingredients are otherwise known as mayonnaise if you whisk vigorously and add the oil to the other stuff in a very slow stream. As written the dressing was thin, but a better emulsion would have given the salad that creamy coating texture that makes Caesar great. The proportions were generally good, but there was too much Worcestershire for my taste, I’d cut the given 1 teaspoon down to 1/2 teaspoon, or even just a few dashes. The other weird aspect of the recipe is that all the garlic is in the croûtons, and none in the dressing. The traditional table-side Caesar preparation in a restaurant has the waiter rubbing the bowl with a garlic clove, that then gets mashed into the dressing. I decided to do something of the same thing and tossed my croûtons with their garlic oil in the bowl I eventually used for the salad. I think leaving all the garlic on the croûtons would have been a mistake. Finally, despite vigorous mincing of the anchovies, there were still a few clumps of salty fish in the final dressing. Not a problem for my sister or me, but my dining companion was not pleased.

The Verdict: I wasn’t optimistic about this salad as I was making it. It didn’t really look right, and tasting the dressing on it’s own I was overpowered by the Worcestershire. Once it was all together it was actually a pretty good salad, just not what I’d ordinarily think of as a Caesar. The lack of texture in the dressing just weirded me out, although all of the basic flavours were there. That said, I went back for seconds of this kinda-sorta-Caesar salad, and my sister who took the rest of lunch the next day said it had improved with age (here’s for hearty romaine that still fine 16 hours after being dressed). Almost all Caesars are good Caesars, and this one tasted just fine, but it was far from the best of my life.

Categories
Poultry The Book

191. Spice-Rubbed Quail p.402


The recipe

I like to think of quail and lobster as perverse challenges on a Japanese game show. They’re complicated and messy to eat, but you’re challenged to do it in your finery with your peers looking on. I can imagine the quiet golf claps from the spectators as you deftly separate the leg joint, and the derision of the judges and jeers from the peanut gallery as you forget your manners and start gnawing on the wings. There are loads of public forums for messy lobster eating, where plastic bibs rule and squirting lobster juice into your dining companions’ hair is considered to be all part of the fun, but very few community organizations seem to throw an annual quail bash, so I prefer to keep small fowl eating confined to my home.

These quail are supposed to be semiboneless, where your butcher has removed all but the wing bones, and the drumstick. I’m sure that would make the eating a lot neater, but it probably costs an arm and a leg, so we ripped our meat off the bone with our teeth thank-you-very-much. The boned out quail are cut in half, rubbed with salt, pepper, cayenne, and allspice, then chilled for a hour, and cooked under the broiler. The quail are served with a gastrique made with chicken stock, lime juice, molasses, scallions, and butter.

The Good: These quail were just delicious. The spice rub did very nice things for them, quail are fairly flavourful birds, so they were able to stand up to the allspice and cayenne. The quick broiling they received was a really nice way to cook them. Unlike chicken you’ve got to cook them as quickly as possible to get the outside nicely crisped before the meat gets overdone, intense direct heat from the broiler seems to be the ideal solution. They’d probably work well quickly grilled over an intense flame.

The Bad: While there was nothing wrong with the gastrique, I thought it was more or less unnecessary. The quail were a complete package on their own, they weren’t begging for an acidic caramel sauce. I tried some of the gastrique with the quail, and it just covered up some of the bird’s deliciousness. Sometimes I think people make gastriques more because they look nice drizzled decoratively on the plate, or painted on with bold brush strokes than any underlying culinary theory. In this case they didn’t do much for the quail, so I’d skip it. However it might depend on what you’re serving it with, a sweet and acidic sauce like this can go a long way towards tying a meal together.

The Verdict: Make the birds, skip the sauce, eat with close friends and loved ones, don’t worry about making a mess.

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

189. Shrimp in Adobo Sauce p.322

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

Anyone following The Project for any length of time knows that I have a bit of a smoked pepper fetish. I get a little weak in the knees when I see the words “ancho chiles” in a recipe. You start this recipe by searing and soaking anchos, then puréeing them with garlic, onion, oregano, and dash of water. The paste is then fried and thinned with white wine, white vinegar, sugar, and salt. It’s simmered until it’s quite thick, and shrimp are mixed in and cooked. You serve the dish with rice, avocados, and cilantro.

The Good: I’m a sucker for spicy seafood dishes, and this was a lovely way of doing it. It tasted like an actual Mexican dish, and very little like the pathetic excuse for Mexican food you can find in Montreal (with a very few exceptions). I’m an enormous fan of adobo sauces like this because they combine heat, smoky depth, acid, sweetness, and aromatics in one cohesive sauce. It hits all the buttons there are to hit, and leaves me very very satisfied.

The Bad: I’m getting pickier about my adobo sauces, and while this was generally good, I’ve had and made better. My main issue was that there was too much ancho flavour, without enough else to balance it. The smokiness of anchos is wonderful, but it can be overwhelming if it’s too concentrated. I also object to the use of white vinegar, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s a missed opportunity, lemon or lime juice would have added another dimension, and white wine vinegar could have been a nice choice too. Similarly, white sugar is just fine, but honey, molasses, or brown sugar could have been more interesting.

While it’s not in any way the recipe’s fault, I decided to get clever and messed this dish up. It annoys me that most recipes call for peeling and deveining shrimp. The 21-25 shrimp called for in this recipe are small enough that eating the vein doesn’t really bother me, getting rid of it is a nice touch, but it’s not strictly necessary like it is with larger shrimp. What really kills me is getting rid of the shells. A huge amount of the flavour in shellfish is in their shells, and throwing it away is just no fun. I usually try to find a way to simmer the shells in some liquid going into the dish to boost the shrimp flavour. In this case I decided that my dining companion and I would just peel our shrimp after cooking. That was incredibly dumb, they were extremely messy, and we ended up losing a lot of the sauce along with the shells.

The Verdict: My love for all things in adobo continues, this wasn’t my favourite example but it worked fairly well, and it’s a good basis to start experimenting from. It took a little while, but no step was too frustrating. The final plate was lovely and colourful, and the cilantro and avocado were excellent compliments to the shrimp. I’ll absolutely make dishes very much like this one again, but I don’t think I’ll be following this recipe letter for letter again.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

183. Georgian Pork Stew p.485


The recipe

The Georgian Salsa called ajika, which I blogged about last time totally blew me away. This pork stew uses a lot of the same flavours, and integrates the ajika as an important ingredient, so predictably, I like it a lot. The stew uses some unusual ingredients including summer savory, corriander seeds, fenugreek, and dried marigolds, but nothing I had too much trouble finding.

I really like it when The Book pushes my limits and asks me to try new and different things, but I simultaneously curse The Book for sending me running all over the city trying to find exotic components, and damn them for not using the unusual ingredients that I have easy access to in their recipes. They have to draw a fine line between authenticity and simplicity in designing these recipes, and no matter where they make their stand someone is going to be upset. In general I’ve got to give them credit for striking a fairly good balance, or at least what seems like a good balance to someone living in a major metropolitan centre with easy access to a specialty shops. I imagine trying to do this project in Smalltown USA with nothing but a Megamart at your disposal would be a challenge. From my perspective getting to crush up flowers and put them in my dinner was good fun, but it might be a deal breaking frustration for other cooks out there.

The method for this stew is a little bit unusual. You begin by adding cubed and seasoned pork shoulder to a covered pot without any oil, then turning the heat to high and letting the pork steam for 10 minutes, only stirring it once. I read that instruction about five times because it sounded so unsual, but it worked, the pork released juices and steamed instead of burning or sticking as I feared it would. After 10 minutes the lid is removed and the pork juices are allowed to evaporate, still over high heat. Once the liquid is gone, oil is added and the meat is sautéed until well browned. While that’s going on you make a paste of garlic, summer savory, and salt, which is added to the browned meat and cooked for a minute. You then grind corriander and fenugreek and add them along with chopped red onion, and marigold and cook for a few minutes. A cup of water is added, and stew is braised for an hour. Once the meat is tender fresh cilantro, Georgian salsa, and pepper are stirred in. The stew is served with more of the ajika on the side, and with pomegranite seeds sprinkled on top (which I never got around to).

I don’t think the steam-before-you-sear technique did good things to my pork. I can see this sort of technique working well with a really fatty and tough piece of pork shoulder, but my relatively lean supermarket pork didn’t survive the process very well. The meat gives up a lot of it’s moisture, which evaporates before the meat is browned. The expectation is that the moisture would re-penetrate the meat during braising, and that there would be enough fat in the meat to keep it moist. That didn’t happen for me, the meat gave up it’s moisture, and never really got it back. Nothing is quite as frustrating as a dish that simmered for hours, but somehow ends up dry.

Other than that fairly major complaint the dish was excellent. The flavours were absolutely spot on. The ajika is amazing, and the additional herbs really brought the dish home. The sauce was irresistible, I’m willing to admit that I went at the sauce with a spoon while pretending to put it away in the fridge. I’m convinced that a better piece of pork would have allowed this technique to work, and deliver succulent meat along with the incredible sauce. If you’re using bog-standard grocery store pork I’d recommend skipping the steaming step, browning and braising should be sufficient to tenderise the meat without driving all the moisture out.

Had the pork worked out this would be a no brainer for a five star rating. Dry pork is a fairly major flaw, so I should penalize it heavily, but all said and done I still really enjoyed this meal, and can’t bear to give it less than a

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

179. Lemon Garlic Lamb Chops with Yogurt Sauce p.504


The recipe

The world is clearly changing, and The Book is starting to get a little bit dated. It’s only 4 years old, but a few things have changed in that time. I mostly notice it with specialty ingredients, which The Book suggests I’ll have to get by mail-order, but that are available at my local grocery store these days. The array of imported fresh fruits and vegetables is staggering, and the burgeoning interest in food from other cultures means that formerly exotic herbs and spices are commonplace. This recipe pairs lamb chops with a minted garlicky yogurt sauce, and calls for taking normal yogurt, straining it through cheesecloth, and letting most of the liquid drain away. This is the home-brew version of Greek / Mediterranean / Baltic yogurt. These days every grocery store in my neighborhood has three different brands to choose from, and that’s not counting the ones with fruit on the bottom.

This yogurt is an example of the good kind of food diversity. A beloved product from another culture, made locally, and not incurring the environmental costs of shipping fresh fruits and vegetables halfway around the world. Although, The Project wouldn’t be possible without the insane system food system we’ve set up for ourselves. No matter how much I want it to be true, tropical fruits just don’t grow in Montreal, and Parmigiano-Reggiano is only produced in Parma. I try to buy locally produced things when I can, but between the diversity of ingredients The Book calls for, and the short growing season we have up here, it’s just not possible for most of the year. That said, I picked up my first CSA box (community supported agriculture, or farm share) last week, and I’m looking forward to eating as much Quebec produce as I can between now and November.

I make a variation on this dish all the time, and I was pleased to find a version of one of my standby dinners in the book. The idea here is to marinade lamb shoulder chops in lemon juice, garlic, dried oregano, and olive oil, then to pat them dry, season with salt and pepper, and pan fry them. Once they’re done the pan is deglazed with the reserved marinade, and once the marinade has cooked for a minute it’s poured over the chops. The lamb is served with a yogurt sauce made of yogurt drained through cheese cloth (I just used Mediterranean yogurt), garlic, fresh mint, salt, and pepper.

This is an extremely simple recipe, and it doesn’t call for anything flashy in terms of ingredients or techniques. When a recipe is a simple as this, details count. The approach and ideas behind this dish are absolutely solid, but some things could have been done better. My main issue was that the shoulder chops were tough. Shoulder meat is tougher than other meat, but that’s the beauty of using lamb, even the shoulder is quite tender. The chops weren’t all that flavourful either, the pan sauce was packed with flavour, but the meat didn’t take on much from the marinade. Both of these problems could have been solved with a longer marinading time. The Book recommends 20 minutes on the counter-top, but if I did them again I’d go with at least three hours in the fridge. Epicurious posters report marinading them for up to 24 hours with good results. The chops were also overcooked by the time they were browned, using a thicker chop would have taken care of that. The idea with the pan sauce is to make a fond while cooking the chops, and then to scrape up the browned bits when making the pan sauce. The Book calls for a non-stick skillet for this operation. This is just silly. Non stick = less sticking = less browned bits to scrape up = less delicious pan sauce. Also, high temperature cooking in non stick cookware isn’t the greatest thing for your health. Beyond the chops, The Book’s instructions would have you stir together the yogurt sauce and serve it immediately, but a sauce like this one needs a minimum of an hour to come together. When it’s freshly made it’ll taste fine, but what a difference an hour will make. .

I’m really fond of this style of dish, but this recipe didn’t work out for me. I’ll stick with my improvised marinades and yogurt sauces. This absolutely could have been a good dish with just a few changes, but as it was I can’t give it a rave review.

Categories
Breakfast and Brunch The Book

170. Tomato, Garlic, and Potato Frittata p.632


The recipe
The Book’s blurb before the recipe suggests that this dish is equally good as a breakfast dish, or for dinner. I’m not convinced that it belongs in the breakfast section at all. I wanted to make a fritatta as a simple way of doing eggs for a crowd, but this dish is actually more of a potato pancake bound together with eggs. I’m a great fan of fritattas because they’re so hands off. I use them as a fridge cleanup device. On a Saturday morning we’ll make coffee, and haul all the tags ends of vegetables out of the crisper, chop them up and brown them in a cast iron pan. While they’re frying we go over the weeks leftovers, and see what can bulk up the fritatta, if we find leftover steak we celebrate, leftover chili makes it a Mexican fritata, and potatoes are an especially prized find. I tried adding leftover rice, but it wasn’t too successful. Once anything and everything is in the pan, I pour a few beaten eggs over top, and leave the pan on the burner for about a minute. I then sprinkle some grated cheese over the still liquid eggs, and pop in in the oven under the broiler for about three minutes. Once the cheese is browned and bubbling I take it out. Like a quiche the centre should still be a bit wobbly as it will continue to cook with the residual heat in the pan. The fritatta is a standby improvised dish for us, but the proportion of eggs to other stuff is a constant. I fight with my impulse to use up all the leftovers, because an overloaded frittata is just no good.

This particular frittata starts by making a mixture of eggs and egg whites, Parmigiano-Reggiano, sliced basil, salt, and pepper. You then lightly brown garlic in a skillet, remove it, and soften diced potatoes in the pan. The potatoes come out, and tiny grape tomatoes are browned until their skins split. Then the potatoes and garlic added back in, and the egg mixture is poured overtop. The eggs cook for 3 minutes uncovered, and 5 mintues covered on top of the stove, then gets put under the broiler for 5 minutes more. Parmesan is sprinkled on top, and put back under the broiler to brown for 2 or 3 minutes more. Then in a nerve wracking move you slide the fritata onto a serving place, and slice it into wedges.

For those of you who are counting, the fritata cooked for 15-16 minutes. My standard fritata is nicely set after 5, not surprisingly the eggs in this dish were overdone and dry.  I misread the instructions, and sprinked the cheese on top before it went under the broiler for the first time, so the parmesan was overdone by the time I took it out, but that’s my fault. My main complaint was the proportions though, by weight there was as much potato and tomato as egg in this recipe, and I was really looking forward to a much eggier dish.

I think the basic concept of this frittata is solid, but I wasn’t thrilled with the excecution. The potato-garlic-tomato-basil flavour combination is a good one. My ideal version of this dish would use more eggs, cook them less, mix up the cheeses (think goat), add fresh basil on top, and cut the potatoes into larger chunks so that they could be browned before going into the fritatta. To me the frittata is a casual and convenient dish, and this version was a bit too overwrought for my tastes, the ingredients in the pan, ingredients out of the pan dance was more effort than I’m willing to put into what should be a very straightforward breakfast. My standby whatever-you-have-on-hand fritatta is much simpler, and ends up tasting better than this one does, so I’ll give it a miss next Saturday morning.

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

163. Grilled Tuna with Warm White Bean Salad p.299

The recipe in the book is similar to this one on Epicurious, except that the book calls for larger (6 oz) tuna steaks.

This dish was a triumph. As I’ve mentioned before my dining companion isn’t a fan of fish, and the book has 95 Fish and Shellfish recipes for us to get through. While she’s open to trying new things, and always tells me she’ll try whatever I make, I want to make her happy, so I’ve been staying away from fish when she’s around for supper. I decided that barely seared tuna would probably be an easy way for her to dip a toe into fishy waters without being overwhelmed. We’ll work our way up to mackerel and cod, but this was a successful baby step.

The dish has two components, grilled tuna steaks seasoned with lemon juice, olive oil, crushed fennel seeds, salt, and pepper, and a bean salad. The salad is made with soaked great northern beans, which are simmered with garlic for an hour. Some of the beans are mashed and combined with the beans’ cooking liquid to hold the salad together, fresh garlic is added in, along with chopped arugula, onion, parsley, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. The tuna is served on top of the beans, and some of the remaining arugula.

I was really happy with this dish, it was simple, clean, and very tasty. Mostly I was happy that my dining companion was happy though. Our grill heats quite unevenly, so some parts of the tuna steaks were more done than I would have liked. My dining companion liked the barely cooked parts of the tuna, but found the overdone bits too fishy for her taste. I thought the fennel worked exceptionally well with the tuna, and I’d absolutely grill steaks like this again. I’d probably try to sear the steaks over an extremely hot flame for just a couple of minutes though, if you’re using high quality tuna, and paying high quality tuna prices, getting a seared exterior, and a barely warm interior is important. The bean salad wasn’t as successful, but not bad at all. The beans needed more garlic, and more salt or lemon juice, they were a little on the bland side. The texture was nice, with just barely firm beans, in a thick sauce. The decision to put chopped arugula into a warm dish is mystifying though. Arugula’s claim to fame is it’s peppery crisp flavour, and that completely disappears the second you heat it. A few of the Epicurious comments suggest that the dish would be better with spinach, and I’m inclined to agree.

I thought this was a really nice dish, it came together easily, tasted good, and managed to do it without dousing everything in cream and butter. It’s the kind of dish that begs to be eaten outside on a beautiful spring day with people you really like. I’ll always remember this dish as the first time my dining companion ate and enjoyed fish for dinner.

Categories
Soups The Book

162. Onion Soup Gratinée p.114

I can’t find a recipe for this soup online.

Typically onion soup is a socially acceptable excuse for sitting down to half a pound of melted cheese. Trying to maneuver those long strands of gooey cheese into ones mouth without getting it all over your front is a social bonding experience best shared with close friends. If you ask people what they like about onion soup they’ll probably say it’s the cheese. This recipe takes the radical position that the cheese is just getting in the way of a really good soup.

This recipe uses the Beef Stock from last time as its main ingredient, along with caramelized onions, vermouth, a bouquet garni, cognac, and Worchestershire sauce. It’s topped with toasted baguette slices, and a thin layer of grated Gruyère and Parmigiano-Reggiano, then popped under the broiler for a bit. The end result is a nice onion soup, but it’s lacking in the cheese department. I agree that sometimes the cheese can be overwhelming, but half the joy of onion soup is the melty strands of cheese that come up with every bite. The soup itself was a little heavy on the booze and Worchestershire sauce, and not as onion flavoured as I would have liked. As I mentioned last time, making the stock for the dish was a big pain, and didn’t have a great pay-off. It was a perfectly fine basis for the soup, but it was hardly better than the store bought stuff.

While I enjoyed my dinner, there are better onion soup recipes out there. My dining companion makes French onion soup often enough, it takes her twenty minutes, and tastes far better than this all day affair.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

158. Perciatelli with Sausage Ragù and Meatballs p.222

I can’t find the recipe for this one online, but you can easily fake it. Last time I gave you the recipe for the life changingly good meatballs used in this recipe and they’re by far the most important part.

I mentioned that I’d be putting those meatballs up against one of the boys’ version of a Sicilian meatball. In the end we did have a meatball battle, but I have no time for looking backwards, so I chose a recipe from the book I hadn’t made yet as my contender. I went with Meatballs in Tomato Sauce, which were very traditional, and basic. There was some mention in the comments that currants, pine nuts, and sweet spices might not be appealing meatball ingredients to everyone, and the battle proved this out. I quite liked his take on the Sicilian meatball, and it was my pick for the battle winner. I’m not sure who won, or who actually voted, or whether anyone was keeping track, but my simple meatballs gathered their share of votes. The reasons given were mostly that people didn’t like some flavour in the Sicilian meatballs though. To each their own.

In this recipe the Sicilian meatballs, and sweet Italian sausages are browned in a large pot. The meat is removed and onions are softened in the remaining oil, then garlic is added and cooked for a couple of minutes. Red wine, a bay leaf, tomato paste and purée are added to the pot, and the meat is nestled back in. The ragù is left to simmer for an hour and a half. Five minutes before serving, frozen green peas are stirred in. The meat is then removed, and some of the sauce is tossed with cooked perciatelli or ridged penne and served. The Book says that traditionally the pasta would be served as a first course, and the sausage and meatballs as a second, but in this recipe the meat is piled on the pasta and served.

I was quite pleased with the sauce, especially because it was infused with the flavours of the meatballs and sausages. The sauce was rich and wonderfully aromatic, and the red wine helped it surpass a standard spaghetti sauce. I like peas in pasta sauces, especially when the pasta’s shape lets them hide inside, and in such a deeply flavoured slow simmered dish their bright freshness was especially welcome. For all the goodness of the sauce, the highlight was really the meatballs, the sausages were entirely forgettable. I used bog standard grocery store Italian sausages, which are always fine, and sometimes pretty darn good, but maybe using a better quality product would have been worth it in this case. I wasn’t happy with the lewd appearance the sausages and meatballs gave the dish, and it’s hard to cut up a sausage when it’s sitting on a pile of pasta. If I used sausage again I’d definitely slice it ahead of time, and toss it with the pasta. I know I’ve said it enough at this point, but by far the best part of the recipe was the meatballs, and it was hard to care about any of the rest of it when they were on the plate.

I was altogether happy with this dish. I especially liked that the cinnamon from the meatballs perfused the tomato sauce. In Quebec cinnamon in spaghetti sauce is very very common, and I grew up on it. It doesn’t appear to be all that popular in the English speaking bits of North America, so I’m pleased to see that this winner of a flavour combination made it into The Book somewhere. Between making the meatballs and simmering the sauce this recipe takes forever, but it’s ideal for chilly days with pouring rain, or snowstorms. This ragù was wonderfuly warming and comforting, if I’d been out skiing all day this is exactly the dish I’d want waiting for me when I got home.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

152. Herbed Lima Bean Hummus p.15


The recipe

Hummus is a staple of my diet, and although I rarely make them, I quite like lima beans, so, I figured this lima bean hummus was a good bet. I’ve been doing some serious damage to the bean spreads in the book, and this was one of the last ones that really appealed to me. In the end it wasn’t the dip I was hoping for. It took some very nice ingredients, did some very silly things with them, and resulted in a muddy confused mess.

You start this dip by simmering frozen limas, onion, and garlic in water, then stirring in cilantro and parsley and letting the herbs steep. You then drain off the water and transfer the solids to the food processor. They then go for a spin with cumin, cayenne, lemon juice, olive oil, fresh dill, and fresh mint. The dip is then allowed to cool, seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon juice, drizzled with olive oil, and served.

There were a lot of big flavours going into this dish, but the preparation did them a disservice. The onion and garlic are boiled along with the limas in this dish. Boiling doesn’t do much for aromatics unless you’re making a soup. I’d much prefer to sweat them to take off some of the harsh edges, in exchange for a little caramelization. As it was most of the onion and garlic flavour, and that of the cilantro and parsley, ended up in the liquid the beans simmered in. Five minutes later that liquid went down the drain, and the exhausted remnants of the aromatics went into the food processor. The beans were still very hot at this point, fresh dill and mint were added. Both of those herbs are wonderful when they’re crisp and cool, and they lose something when heated. By the time the dip had come together and cooled to room temperature is was a bland mush. I tried to overcompensate with lemon juice and salt to bring things back to life, but once the flavours are gone they’re gone. I added toasted pine nuts in a last ditch effort to save this dip, and they did moderately improve things, but no one was really thrilled and I had to plow through three days of leftovers.

Beyond the counterproductive cooking instructions, I think there was too much going on in this dip. Between onions, garlic, four different types of herbs, cumin, and cayenne, there were a lot of flavours competing for attention. Granted they were all washed out imitations of themselves, but it was still a busy dish. In fact there was so much other stuff in there, that the lima beans weren’t really a player. They were puréed, so their texture wasn’t an issue, and other than adding a little starchiness they weren’t a big flavour contributor. You probably won’t like this dish, but it won’t be because you don’t like lima beans.

Altogether this dish was entirely forgettable. It wasn’t particularly bad, just another bland mush. It’s only truly frustrating when you’re the one making it. You put fresh fragrant ingredients in, and methodically set about discarding or destroying their goodness, you then serve what’s left.