Recipe Round-Up: The Wicked Healthy Cookbook

The Wicked Healthy Cookbook was doing the rounds on Instagram and blogs, and looked interesting and different enough to add to my collection, so I gave myself a present. It certainly is a beautiful book, with recipes ranging from simple to quite technical. The book is loosely divided into recipe types, with chapter headings including First Bites, Handhelds, Bowls, Straight-Up Vegetables, Comfort Food, Nature's Candy, Wicked Healthy Juices and Cocktails, and Sauces and Bases. Of course, the use of the term Wicked is sprinkled liberally throughout, but sometimes in a way that implies a certain food is wicked vs healthy, to which I say no thank you to your diet culture bullshit. But at least that is fairly minor. I certainly won't be making every recipe in this book, but there is enough that I want to make plus lots to pique my interests.

Banh Mi with Lemongrass Tofu, and Ginger Aioli: This recipe involves making a few components, there is the tofu (in a marinade of orange juice, lemongrass, and others), the aioli (made by mixing sushi ginger and others with mayo - I used Vegenaise), and also some pickled carrots (meant to be made with chillies, but I left them out). Overall, everything is very easy. I found the aioli to be a bit too strong with the lime flavour, so I added an extra spoonful of mayo. But the tofu and the pickles were lovely. I was serving three people, so I cut my 375g block of tofu into 6 slabs - 2 per banh mi. The tofu is baked in the marinade, and I did have to increase the heat a bit to get the marinade to turn into a nice glaze. Overall a wonderful mix of flavours.
Rating: :)



Kickass Plant-Based Reuben on Dark Rye: Fortune smiled on me when I found a loaf of dark rye sourdough at Coles, and knew exactly what I wanted to make. This recipe does take some advanced planning to make the seitan. First you need to make a coriander spice mix, which makes a whole cup (though mine was a little less as I left out the tsp of cayenne pepper). Half of this is mixed into the seitan dough, and the other half is used to roll the seitan in before baking. The seitan is baked wrapped in foil. It was delicious seitan, though I found it hard to cut as thin as they did. Also, unlike the picture, my seitan was very pink! The dough does include some beetroot. Once the seitan is made, you need to caremelise some onions, and then make your sandwiches with sauerkraut, cheese slices (I used Daiya Smoked Gouda), and their Sriracha Russian Dressing. I made the dressing, but without the sriracha. I also used Vegenaise as the base rather than making my own mayo. A very messy but delicious sandwich!
Rating: :D





Banana Blossoms with Coconut and Chile: Obviously. I left out the chili. Also I committed possibly a cardinal sin, and used tinned banana blossoms even though they say that they don't work well here and you should use fresh. Hunting then down and spending actual hours preparing them seemed like effort, so I figured I'd see what happened. I made a half recipe using an 8oz tin of flowers, and it worked fine. I had one giant serve using mung bean vermicelli. My main issue was that the coconut was a bit too strong, next time I would decrease the amount of coconut milk even further than I usually do. It is served with some lettuce, cucumber, and coriander, as well as lime juice. I would have liked a bit more flavour to go on the greens. Overall, the flavours were not quite there for me with this one.
Rating: :|



Broccoli with Fermented Black Bean Sauce: This was a lovely light dinner, and very fast to make. The sauce is a mix of soy, rice wine, sweetener, and sesame oil and the sautee is onions, fermented black beans, and broccoli. I left out all the chillies. It also calls for water chestnuts, but I am just not a fan so I increased the broccoli. Normally I would have subbed with celery for some crunch, but I didn't have any. I had this for dinner after a huge lunch, but if you were looking to make it more substantial you could easily add some tofu. This said it serves four as a side dish or small plate, I served two with it over some rice.
Rating: :)



Strozzapreti with Cauliflower Mornay, Mushrooms, and Kale: I made this with Trivelle pasta, not strozzapreti, because that's what I could find. The first part of this recipe is to make the separate Cauliflower Mornay Sauce. I made a half recipe, expecting to get about a litre out of it, but I only got about 750mL. Perhaps my cauliflower was a bit smaller than theirs. It is an easy cauliflower and cashew based sauce to make, and has a pleasant savoury taste. Once you have that, it is a quick ride to dinner. I halved the recipe, using only 250g of pasta. But still a full bunch of kale, as that cooks down to a very small amount. Kale is meant to be steamed and chopped, I blanched it by pouring some boiling water over it, then chopped it in the colander with some scissors. The mushrooms are dried black fungi. I ended up using a bit more than half the amount for this, as that is what I had left in my bag of mushrooms. More like a 2/3 amount for the recipe. It all went together very nicely, along with some onion and garlic, to a comforting dinner.
Rating: :)



Mac & Cheese: This recipe is listed under the Wicked Healthy Cheese Sauce recipe, though they also have some suggestions for additions to a mac and cheese bowl bar elsewhere in the book. The cheese sauce is based on cashews, butternut,and garlic. It is fairly easy to make. Much like the cauliflower mornay, it involves boiling the big ingredients until soft and then blending with the rest of it. I used a blend of garlic cloves and garlic powder, as I was feeling to tired to peel 1/4 cup worth of cloves. The sauce alone is great, but when it is added to some macaroni it becomes magic! I made a half recipe of the sauce, which was too much for 250g of pasta, so I had some sauce left over as well. They actually suggest a double recipe for 1lb of pasta, which would also be very saucy. I made our own simple mac and cheese bowls by adding some roasted broccoli, and also some leftover seitan from the reubens (which I pan-fried and glazed in a bit of BBQ sauce).
Rating: :D



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Gizmo loved catnip, though she didn't go crazy playing. She liked to sniff, lick, and roll around.