Great Chefs Cook Vegan is a book I've had for years, but I've never actually made anything from it. In many respects, it is a coffee table cookbook. I am not up int he culinary world, so I am not familiar with any of the Great Chefs in the book, but the majority of the recipes are very fancy and very fiddly. While I am all for fun and experimenting in the kitchen, maybe not quite as much as some of these recipes. Leave it to the Great Chefs! Each Great Chef contributed a three to four recipe menu (though many of the recipes are made up of many smaller sub-recipes). While I normally love a menu plan, this was a bit beyond me. But there are some individual recipes that looked manageable, so MoFo seemed like a good reason to be brave and pick three of the easiest recipes in the book.
Curried Cauliflower with Currants and Pine Nuts (Cat Cora): This is a chilled cauliflower salad, without anything fancy. The dressing is easy to make, a mix of rice vinegar, olive oil, and seasoning. I used the Garam Masala option rather than the curry powder, and as a result my cauliflower did not turn out nice and yellow like in the photo. The cauliflower is mixed with currants, sunflower seeds, and pine nuts, though I ended up decreasing the amounts of seeds and nuts as it was just too much for the amount of cauliflower. You can see that the currants made it look patchy and purple, but they were very nice and plump after being chilled and soaked in the dressing in the fridge. I added the pine nuts before serving, rather than leaving them to soak in the mixture, to keep them crunchy. I made a half recipe of this, and got two servings when I served it alongside some sweet potato falafel bites. One major change I made was to the dressing, which had a lot of olive oil in it. I have a low tolerance to oil, so I normally sub it out in salad dressings where it is a main component otherwise they make me feel sick. I used some veggie stock thickened with guar gum, and right before serving I mixed through a drizzle of the oil.
Rating: :)
Kiwi Parfait (Cat Cora): This was a delightful surprise! Layers of kiwi (I used yellow because it is a bit less acidic than green), plain yoghurt (the recipe calls for soy but I used almond) and crushed graham crackers (I used digestive) are topped with some curried cashews. I used Japanese curry powder on the cashews, because it is my favourite and it has no chili in it. Wow, wow wow wow. Everything came together so well, and was just super delicious. It is easy to scale the recipe down, which is what I did to make one serve.
Rating: :D
Mignardises (Charlie Trotter): These are basically like little truffles. I scaled the recipe down to 1/8 of the original ingredients, as I didn't need 80 truffles and also 1 cup of cashew butter and 1 cup of maple syrup makes for a pricey recipe. Scaling it down made it much more agreeable for the regular kitchen. The recipe calls for nama shoyu, which I didn't have, so I did some reading and ended up using a bit of sweet soy instead. I used a small cookie scoop and ended up with 4 truffles (not 10, they must have used a very small scoop). I rolled two in coconut, and two in maple hemp seeds. These were really nice, rich without being too rich, and a good flavour.
Rating: :)
Cute Kitty Photo of the Post
Of course, cats don't limit themselves just to cat beds. Here is a photo of Gizmo tucked up in our bed! Yes, my bed is not mine alone. It also belongs to the cats. This photo was taken a long time ago, back in Sydney, three doona covers ago. Yes, that is a doona cover of black and white cows in a river and it says Moo River on it. I still have this tucked away in a cupboard for guests!
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