The China Study Cookbook recipe #5

Baked Vegetables from The China Study Cookbook.  It was supposed to be Scrumptious Baked Vegetables With Fresh Spinach but the bagger at Kroger's failed to give me the bag containing $3.50 worth of spinach, $.25 of ginger root, and $2.00 of broccoli crowns.  When I got home, I noticed the ginger was missing and assumed it had just been left on the counter.  But how did they manage to misplace a huge box of spinach and a big bag of broccoli?  I wonder if the next person got it?

Whatever!  From now on, I'm watching those guys.  It's wasn't the money so much as I wanted my darn spinach.

The vegetables, without the broccoli and spinach, were pretty nasty.  The recipe instructions bugged me, so I messed with it to try to improve it, but I think it was hopeless.  First off, sweet potatoes take longer to cook than green vegetables.  They should have been precooked.  Second, it told you to cook the vegetables with no seasoning and then, when they're done, add dry herbs--thyme, basil and rosemary.  And raw garlic.  Yuck.

So I made the sauce and poured it over the vegetables before cooking them.  That made sense for the herbs but not for the orange juice and balsamic vinegar.  It came out sweet and bitter.

I wonder if it was a misprint?  In any event, not telling the reader how big to cut up everything, so that it would all cook at the same rate, was not doing us a kindness.

I also cooked Bourbon Barbeque Prawns With Greens, for the meat eaters. 

The prawns (I subbed shrimp) were okay, just a little overcooked.  The sauce didn't stick to the shrimp, but it tasted good spooned over.  I substituted gold rum for bourbon so I may never know how the dish was supposed to taste.  I noticed that no one came back for seconds.

(This is a picture of the leftovers.)