Stuff I've Been Cooking - August 2024
Mostly veggies and one remarkable cake.
Here’s the latest stuff I’ve been cooking in my kitchen. Most of it represents my latest attempts to eat slightly healthier, but there may or may not be a sheet cake thrown in for good measure…
Cabbage and kimchi rolls
I’m in my cabbage era, and so far that’s really just entailed me roasting it and adding tahini sauce and herbs (as per the NBD Fancy doctrine). In an effort to diversify the approach, I tackled Hetty Lui McKinnon’s cabbage and kimchi rolls from Tenderheart. Here she remixes a classic Eastern European cabbage roll recipe by throwing kimchi into the mix. It seems like an obvious move that someone should have made ages ago. Maybe they have? What a great touch - augmenting a cabbage dish with fermented cabbage. Kind of makes you ask what doesn’t kimchi elevate? Outside of a chocolate sundae, I can’t think of much.
These cabbage rolls were pretty fun to make. They also took a lot longer than I had expected. I definitely allotted a healthy chunk of time for the process, but it still was a lengthy endeavor. A fun one though!
The result was very good, but I wouldn’t say great. The flavors of the roll, which I enjoyed quite a bit, didn’t quite meld with the sauce for me. I couldn’t tell if that was a sauce issue, a seasoning issue, or a Ben issue. I admittedly haven’t had much experience with Ukrainian cabbage rolls; so it’s possible that it’s a dish I don’t fundamentally connect with. I found that salting the sauce a bit more helped - as it often does - but overall, this was a fun experiment but probably not one I’ll go back to in the immediate future.
I’m curious to hear if cabbage roll fiends have tried this recipe and if it’s in line with the dish that they love.
Fragrant beets and cherries with cashew butter
My dislike for berries and stone fruit is known far and wide, and as a result most people assume I don’t like cherries too. But actually, I’m fine with cherries! I don’t gravitate towards them, but I’m definitely not repulsed by them either. That’s why I wasn’t put off by this dish from Steven Satterfield’s Vegetable Revelations. It involves assembling a salad of sorts from beets, cherries, and cashews.
First beets are roasted in a dish with vinegar as well as dried hibiscus and chamomile flowers. I had neither the hibiscus nor the chamomile, but being the brave soul that I am, I forged ahead anyway. No petal shortage could stop my momentum.
The beets essentially pickle in the oven, and delightfully so! Had the recipe ended here, I would have been happy. Dayenu, as they say. (Of note, this yielded way too many pickled beets for this recipe; so I repurposed many for breakfast bowls and salads throughout the week to spectacular effect).
The beets are then placed atop a cashew butter mixture and scattered with cherries, mint, and roasted cashews. This was excellent. The pickled beets complemented the sweet cashews and fruity cherries. The cashew butter lubricated everything and tied all elements together. And the mint - well, who doesn’t love mint? Always gotta have herby freshness. I’m sure the hibiscus and chamomile would have added a lovely fragrance to the dish, but to be honest, the dish was perfectly amazing without them.
Not only was this a total winner, but it’s moved the needle for me on cherries. Dare I say it, I may gravitate towards them now.
Broccoli Steak + Chimichurri
I haven’t made many recipes from Instagram or TikTok because a) I have a ton of cookbooks that I still need to plunder, and b) I have a general suspicion of hipsters peddling bean content. But then I remembered that someday I hope to be a hipster peddling bean content; so I gave in.
This recipe from @alfiecooks_ won me over with a creamy bean sauce spooned beautifully on a plate. Then came a giant broccoli steak and a bright chimichurri sauce. It was so beautiful; I just had to make it.
A few observations:
The bean sauce, which involves a can of butter beans, lemon, garlic, and nutritional yeast, requires some seasoning, finessing, and thinning out. But once it’s where it needs to be, it’s very good. The chimichurri was also quite nice and came together in a heartbeat.
The broccoli steak is where I have the greatest reservations. Again, it turned out well, but I feel the choice to cut the head of broccoli into steaks is more for the ‘gram than anything else. It looks great but isn’t the most effective use of the vegetable. Simply put, I was only able to get two steaks out of any head of broccoli, and the rest was waste. Not literal waste - I saved extra florets for another meal. But it felt silly using so little of the broccoli for this dish.
Plus, while a broccoli steak appears chunky and deeply satisfying on video, the truth is it takes, like, three seconds to eat and is not very filling. A broccoli steak is no steak steak. More to the point, this dish presents like a main but is really a side.
Still, the flavors of are lovely, and going forward, I would just cut the broccoli into florets and roast them (skip the pan searing, even if it looks sexy in videos). You’ll get a bigger yield, and it will taste better too.
Not for nothing: this recipe yields so much chimichurri and bean sauce that you’ll have no problem re-using those leftover broccoli florets with them.
Salted Butterscotch Fudge Sheet Cake
Following the unbridled success of the Fudgy Devil’s Food Sheet Cake, I decided to dive back into Everyday Cake by Polina Chesnakova to see if lightning would strike twice. My next target: salted butterscotch fudge sheet cake.
First a simple sponge is made with buttermilk, sour cream, and other usual suspects (butter, flour, love). Once it comes out of the oven, we embark on a dramatic, occasionally violent, but generally fascinating butterscotch fudge frosting. This involves making a stovetop caramel, adding heavy cream to it, trembling amidst scaldingly hot butterscotch gurgles, and then spreading it onto the cake.
It is a much easier process than described, and the recipe earns bonus points for not needing to wait until the cake is fully cooled before frosting it. But of course the big question is whether or not the salted butterscotch fudge sheet cake (or SBFSC) could reach the great heights of Chesnakova’s devil’s food cake. Technically, no, it did not.
But… BUT.. this may have been the most successful sponge I have ever made. Biting into it, the cake had the moist texture of a perfect grocery store cake, which I say as high praise. Those cakes in the supermarket have an almost unattainable quality, thanks in part to the chemicals and preservatives pumped into them. Surely a mere mortal couldn’t mimic such texture.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, we can! And this is the recipe to do it. Another triumph from Everyday Cake.
However, there is a quibble. The frosting hardens somewhat atop the cake, which makes sense since it IS a fudge topping. As a result though, the frosting doesn’t always marry its spongy foundation, causing large shards to simply topple off onto the plate the moment a fork deigns to make contact. It’s not a serious issue, but it is a minor annoyance. And if you’re thinking about cutting a small slice for yourself as you pass through the kitchen, just know there’s a significant chance that the frosting will tumble off the sponge and onto the floor. No one should live with that fear.
Otherwise, delicious!
What have you been making recently? Leave a comment and be sure to tell all your friends about NBD Fancy!
So good Ben!!! My boyfriend despises broccoli but I want to try the broccoli steak — do you think any other veggies would work well?