Recipe R&R 72-71

Squash, roasted tomato and popped black bean salad
from A Modern Way to Cook

To be fair, I should get the book back out of the library and check the time estimate on this. I wrote down "30 minutes" but it says inside the recipe to roast the squash for 40 minutes. Little matter--it actually took me 54 minutes.

The idea of popping black beans is you rinse and dry the cooked beans with paper towels--
Why paper towels? I have a stack of tightly woven dish towels that would have been fine for the purpose. It's about time that a book titled "A Modern Way to Cook" would stop harking back to the old days when every cook kept a roll of paper towels in the kitchen. That's SO seventies, man.
--then dry-fry in a medium-hot skillet until they pop and turn crisp. Mine failed to pop, probably because they weren't dry. Don't blame the paper towels, blame me for forgetting to do that step.

However, if I had remembered to dry the beans, would they have still left my skillet coated with black grime that took me ten minutes to clean off? I didn't include the extra cleanup time in my results, but I wanted to. Just out of spite.

Sorry to write so negatively. Recipes like this make me feel like a crappy cook who can't take time to read a recipe. It didn't taste good enough to be worth the hassle of peeling and slicing butternut squash, seeding cardomon and grinding the seed, jesting a lime, grating ginger; putting pans in and out of the oven and then having to wash two cookie sheets when one would have done the job.
Luckily I followed this disaster with a winner:



Spanish Tapas Peppers
author unknown: darn!

Take a bunch of lovely little peppers from your garden, stuff them with richness, and bake them a bit. Serve warm. Ahhh.

The recipe called for bell peppers but the Italian frying peppers I used were much, much better. The richness consisted of a lot of little bits of stuff that you simply had to chop up all together: raisins, garlic, green olives, anchovies, tomato, saffron, bread crumbs and olive oil. I was scared of the raisins and anchovies, but they disappeared into a medley of flavor.

I may never make this again but I'll smack my lips forever.