Cookbook Challenge Week 1: Appetite for Reduction, Recipes #1 & #2

It's time for another ppk Cookbook Challenge. The reason I decided to try again despite not finishing the last one, is that there's no minimum number of recipes to shoot for each week. So sometimes I might only do one (especially during Vegan Month of Food in October), sometimes I'll do 4 or more. It really just depends on what I see that fits together for a week's menus.

Ratings (please bear in mind that the ratings are based on the recipes with my gluten free/soy free subs, so if the subs are significant, it's not necessarily the recipe's fault - sometimes I'll add extra notes about this or change the rating slightly to account for the substitutions)

* = yuck, not even worth trying again

** = has potential, but needs significant tweaking

***= good, needs a little adjustment

****= excellent

Week one is an Isa Chandra Moskowitz/Terry Hope Romano week so we can use recipes from any of their books. But since I've been wanting to delve into it more anyway, I've decided to do all of my recipes this week from Appetite for Reduction.

Recipe #1:
Spinach Linguine with Edamame Pesto (p174)

A pasta dish with a soy based pesto might seem an odd choice for a gluten-free/soy-free blog. But the substitutes were actually really easy:

1. Tinkyada brown rice spinach spaghetti for the spinach linguine
2. Frozen green peas for the edamame

This recipe was really straightforward to make and only took longer than the stated 30 minutes because the tinkyada pasta takes longer to cook than normal pasta.

The flavors went together really well. My only issue was that the pesto was a little sweeter than perfect for me. I think it's because in my recollection, green peas are a little sweeter than edamame. Now that I really think about it, the peas came in a 16 oz bag, so I used 2 oz more than called for with the edamame. But rather than have 2 oz of peas sitting in my freezer, all I would change next time is to add a little more lemon juice/salt/nutritional yeast just to cut the sweet a bit. I did add the salt/nutritional yeast on my plate and it made it really good. The serving size was plenty big and with a few fresh tomato slices, I was really full.

Rating: ***1/2 (I think the main issue was with my substitution)

Recipe #2:

Cauliflower Pesto Soup (p 210)

Apparently, I'm in the mood for Italian flavors this week. I really wanted this as a companion for Caesar salad. The few pine nuts in my pantry had been sitting around too long and met their fate in the trash bin , so I toasted a few slivered almonds for garnish instead of pine nuts as suggested.

It was easy to make and didn't take any longer than the noted time of 25 minutes. This would even be easy enough to throw together after a long day at work. With the small serving size and just 50 calories per serving, don't plan on it being your entire dinner. But, if you have dressing ready, you can easily put together an entree salad while the soup is boiling. It was great complement to Caesar salad.

Overall, this was really creamy and good. With both the vegetable broth and the added salt, it had too much salt for my taste (and that's saying something!). Next time, I'll try not adding the extra salt and then salt to taste at the end if it needs more. I'm just starting to like cauliflower at all and I'm a recent basil convert. So even saying that I'd make it again goes to show that it's a really good recipe.

Rating: ***