The Anjelica Home Kitchen cookbook

July 15, 2012 at 5:42 pm (Grains, Other, Salads, Sauce/dressing, Tempeh, unrated)

I really liked the tagine recipe that I made from the Anjelica Home Kitchen cookbook last week, so I decided to try a few other recipes.  Brief notes are below.

House tahini dressing

The angelica house dressing is made from tahini (1/4 cup), umeboshi paste (tablespoon), a scallion, water (1/2 cup), and lots of parsley (1/2 cup packed).  It’s supposed to be “mild and delicate, and low in acid” (hence the absence of vinegar or lemon juice).  It’s a bit reminiscent of Annie’s Goddess dressing, but Derek says “not nearly as good.”  Mainly, it needs some kind of acid.  Also, it doesn’t have any oil, so it’s much lower in calorie than Annie’s.  Once I added some vinegar I thought it was reasonably good on my salad.  I like how green it is (in color and taste).  The cookbook says it’s also good on grains or pasta.  I’m not sure I’ll make it again, but we did manage to finish off the whole cup of it.

Sea vegetable salad

I also tried the fresh sea vegetable salad with rice wine vinaigrette.  It calls for fresh dulse, wakame, and sea beans, but I couldn’t find dulse or sea beans, and my wakame was dried.  I rehydrated enough wakame to substitute it in for all three fresh sea vegetables.  The recipe also calls for cucumber, radish, carrot, scallions, cilantro, and sesame seeds.  The dressing is supposed to have half a cup of apple cider, but I misread it and put in apple cider vinegar.    It also calls for mirin, rice vinegar, and olive oil.  The salad is supposed to be garnished with an orange (diced), and clover sprouts.  But I couldn’t find any clover sprouts.

So what I ended up making wasn’t so close to the original recipe, but still I thought it wasn’t bad.  The dressing was light and refreshing tasting, and the wakame was reasonably mild.  The main problem with the salad was that it was extremely wet.  The vegetables seemed to be drowning in the vinaigrette.  There isn’t really enough oil to make a proper emulsion.

Derek didn’t care for the salad.  He said the seaweed was “kind of weird.” He had one serving, but wasn’t interesting in having another.  Maybe he would have liked it better if I had had the right mix of dulse, fresh wakame, and sea beans, and if the salad had the sweetness from the apple cider.

Barbecued tempeh

The third dish I tried was the barbecue tempeh recipe.  It’s not all that different from the one I normally make, from Modern Vegetarian Kitchen.  Like that recipe, it calls for apple cider vinegar, soy sauce, maple syrup, and olive oil.  It also calls for fresh garlic and a dried chipotle pepper.  The main difference is that it calls for sun-dried tomatoes which are (along with the dried chipotle pepper) plumped in water and then pureed with the other ingredients.  As a result the sauce is much thicker than the typical barbecue marinade.  I also decided to add a few drops of liquid smoke to the marinade.

Derek didn’t like the recipe much at all.  He said it tasted “cheap.”  I’m not sure if it was the mustiness of the sun-dried tomatoes or the artificialness of the liquid smoke.   I clearly will have to try it again sometime without making uncalled for modifications to the recipe.

Three-grain pilaf

This recipe calls for 1 cup basmati rice, 1/2 cup of millet, 1/2 cup of quinoa, 3/4 tsp. salt, 1/2 cup scallions, 2 Tbs. olive oil, and 3 cups of water or vegetable stock.  You toast the grains and scallions in the oil, bring the water to a boil on the stove, then bake the pilaf in the oven.

I wanted to use up some millet and quinoa, so doubled those amounts to 1 cup each, and kept the original amount of rice.  I multiplied all the other ingredients by 1.5, except the salt which I left at 3/4 tsp.  I used plain water not broth.

The pilaf wasn’t all that interesting tasting.  It really needed some more seasoning.  The scallions weren’t enough.  Also, it was not salty enough.  I guess I shouldn’t have cut down the salt.