Wrapping Up and Up Next

I've been dragging out my goodbye to The New Persian Kitchen, because it's lovely, and the recipes are awesome, and I wish that I'd made more. I'm not ready to say goodbye. Definitely a keeper. We had some delicious meals out of this book, and I know I'm going to refer back to it often, especially as the seasons change, and different produce is more readily available.

I've already made that potato salad for a second time, and I'm sitting here thinking about those sesame carrots.

However, it's time to move on. I'm trying to ramp up my vegetable game even more than I already am, so the behemoth The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, by Deborah Madison, jumped out at me as an obvious choice.

I've cooked a few recipes from this, but I have a hard time getting into enormous, dense, pictureless cookbooks. Admittedly, you wouldn't be able to pick this thing up if they had included pictures, but recipe titles alone are not usually that exciting. I'm looking forward to this one! I've heard so many great things about it, it's high time I did a deep-dive.

A drawback

One of the few drawbacks I can think of with The New Persian Kitchen is that it's fairly slim on recipes. Several sections contain 6-8 recipes. Several recipes prominently feature ingredients that aren't in season. I suspect Seared Chicken with Peaches is delightful, but I'm not going to bother making it until summer. I'm still on the prowl for rhubarb. I keep asking at the supermarket, and they keep saying it's not ready yet. I thought now was the time, or a little past the time, but I'm not a rhubarb expert. I have loved what I've made, but I feel like I'm running out of recipes that I can or want to make (I limit my grains, so that's like a whole section that I can't use). There's a lot of gold in this book, though!

I did make Vinegar Carrots with Toasted Sesame Seeds last week, and it was delicious. The sesame oil and rice vinegar were flavors that I wasn't expecting from Persian food, but it was balanced and tasty. Batman even ate some of them (it's impossible to feed him vegetables. Even when he was a baby.) He said he liked them, and that they tasted like McDonald's.
I said, "Your carrots taste like McDonald's??? HOW???"
He said, "Because they're salty and good."

Okay, that's a description I can stand by and approve of. haha!

Also, these kept for a week in the fridge, and were just as good, thrown on salads, as they were the first day.

Conclusion: Liked it.

I also made Naturally Sweet Dried Lime Tea. I ordered dried limes on Amazon, and everything. The whole process was like some weird science experiment, and those limes did SMELL like lime candy.

The finished product tasted like boiled water. I have no photo, because it looked like slightly greenish boiled water.

I have 18 dried limes left, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to be carting them around with me for the rest of my life.

Conclusion: Hated it.

Ick

It was bound to happen eventually. Chicken with Potatoes and Olives sounds mundane. I like all the ingredients. It calls for pre-cooked chicken (I went the rotisserie route). I thought it was going to be a fast, unexciting, chicken-saladish dish to pull together. (Everything is bound together with yogurt)

It WAS fast. It was also nasty.

You don't LOOK revolting.

The problem, for me, was the spice blend. You toast fennel, coriander, and mustard seeds, grind them in a coffee grinder, then add to the mix.

1 tablespoon of mustard seeds is a lot of mustard. Like, A LOT. A ton. A mountain of mustard. My optimistic self thought that all the flavors would balance out. Nope. This was sinus-clearing, horseradish-level mustard flavor, with a floral backnote (the coriander?). I couldn't eat it. I picked at it, dumped it, ate and apple and almond butter, and called it a night. Needless to say, I woke up starving.

Oh, yeah--there's the ugly. All of this got tossed. It hurt my "waste not" heart.

Conclusion: Hated it.