| Very nice dinner. I did add a smidge (1/4tsp?) of red pepper flakes to the tomatoes as they were cooking, not enough to make it hot, just enough to leave your tongue a bit tingly afterwards.
Recipe says it serves 6. Maybe as a side dish. I served this as a vegetarian main and two of us ate it all. Probably would have served three with a salad.
If you had a bit of cooked meat or sausage to use up, you could stir that in, I'm sure.
Might be a good dish for a potluck dinner.
Not hard to make, but not a weeknight dinner (by my standard of getting food on the table within 30min).
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| A risotto with barley instead of rice - why not!
I made a half recipe as dinner for 2, with a big salad as a go-with. A half recipe should serve 3, and it might have, but the servings would be pretty skimpy.
The cauliflower was a surprise for me in a dish like this, but it worked quite well. Some mushrooms would be good also, but I think barley and mushrooms is a combination made in heaven. |
| I made a half version of this (which should serve 6) as a main course for two. Not generous servings, but sufficient. And very nice. The squeaky beans contrasted with the softer barley and mushrooms. Used snijbonen (runner beans in English?) with one haricot vert that I seem to have picked up accidentally. |
| Good enough, but nothing special.
I didn't make the sauce, and I didn't use the cherry tomatoes.
The bell pepper bits didn't get quite done in the time it took the chicken to get done.
The marinating time (1-3 hours) is too long to make this a week-night dinner, and too short to prep in the morning or the night before. |
| DH liked this a lot. I served this as a main course with some cooked shrimp added, more or less a whole recipe for two. Quite tasty, easy and fast to assemble.
- Lacking soba noodles, I used whole wheat spaghetti.
- I thought the sauce was a bit too thin. Maybe 1/4cup or 1/3cup veg stock would be better.
Very nice on a hot evening. |
| Liked this a lot. Lots of raw garlic, so not for the faint of heart. A half recipe would serve 3 (as written). |
| Pasta and lentils make a nice dinner! A half recipe served two generously.
This is easy to make, but maybe a bit long for a weeknight since the lentils can take 45 minutes to cook. On the other hand, it's a leisurely preparation then, so might work.
Having no fresh bell peppers at hand, I used some jarred roasted bell peppers, which were fine. |
| An easy and nice carrot salad with a slightly exotic taste. |
| Pretty blah. Last week I cook salmon in the same way and it was quite good. This time it was dry and tasteless. Not sure if it was the salmon itself (on special today) or if it was slightly overcook?
But the lentils, usually a favorite, stood out in their blah-ness. Since they were fairly shortly out of the box (into a jar), I thought they might be overcooked; instead they were undercooked. And they really lacked flavor. Put those lardons back in. Or maybe cook in chicken stock instead of water.
The center of a definitely so-so dinner. |
| An interesting and easy way to cook salmon. I'm not sure it tasted any better than broiled, but it was good.
The mushroom garnish was good. There's a bit of conflict between the instructions and the picture. The picture clearly shows sliced shrooms, but the instructions never have you slicing them. Also, I made half a recipe and had much more in the way of garnish than the photo shows.
Nevertheless it all tasted good. |
| Pretty good, this was. And it's easy and fast, so it's hard to complain.
- I made all the sauce (for four), since that was the size of my tuna can, but made only pasta for two. This was fine and it didn't seem over-sauced.
- No extra pasta water.
- For the tomato sauce, I used a cup of tomato "sauce", which is nothing but tomatoes, deseeded, cooked down, and puréed., from the freezer.
- We both thought the olives should be coarsely chopped, rather than halved.
- The Parmesan shavings were a nice touch.
Altogether a nice nice with a salad. |
| I'll add a Me too here. A very nice, quick light dinner. I made a half recipe, used a whole adobo chipotle, unseeded, which made the dish nicely tingly. For cheese, I used what we call pyramid goat cheese. It's a commercial goat cheese that comes in a pyramid shaped box and has a texture a bit softer than cream cheese. (We find it useful for dabbing on whatever needs that extra big of flavor.) I warmed/softened my tortillas by laying them on the sauté-ing mushrooms.
A nice idea that could be embellished in many ways. Adding some (soaked) dried mushrooms might be interesting. |
| I made more or less a half recipe using the last of last Thanksgiving turkey, rather than poaching chicken breasts.
I chopped the chipotle in adobo (unseeded) and added it to the dressing, rather than tossing strips with the salad.
The recipe calls for quite a lot of chicken broth used to thin the dressing, but I thought it was plenty thin without any addition. (Can't think why a dressing of olive oil, buttermilk, lime juice, and white wine vinegar would be too thick.)
Mixed the dressing and meat, along with radishes, cilantro, and avocado, with 100g of mâche+roquette, rather than romaine, of which there was none at the shop.
It all tasted good, especially eating outside.
Dressing very tasty. |
| Pretty good stuff. I had 400g of shrimp, somewhat more than required for a half recipe. Used all the spices. Except for the shrimp peeling, the rest of the prep is fast. The dish cooks in less than 10 minutes. Easy and yummy. |
| Made a halfish recipe of this, served over plain basmati rice as the main course. (Discovered that a medium-size European head of cauliflower weighs about 75% more than an American one, according to the weight given here.)
Interesting that it was such a dry dish, there's no sauce at all. Altogether, especially with a nice Indian pickle on the side, it was pretty good. I used 2 chiles for my half recipe and it was nicely tingly.
Easy and quick to make. You could do the cauliflower ahead and prep the rest, then finish off the dish while the rice rests. |
| Half recipe as dinner for two (with salad), quite good, although we found the caraway taste a bit strong. I can easily see this as a brunch dish, or even as a starter, cut in thin wedges with a a bit of salad on the side.
This was my most successful frittata to date, maybe because I have an appropriately sized cast iron skillet now. |
| We're big fans of broccoli salads and this is another favorite already.
I had 5-3/4 ounces of chickpeas in a jar, which was more or less a heaping cup, rather less that the 8 ounces that Shulman asks. I'd stick with the cup measurement, since what I had turned out to be a good balance.
Interesting that the photo in the book does not show any red bell pepper strips; those seemed more or less superfluous to us.
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| A bit disappointing. A good idea, but didn't work as well as I expected.
It might be nicer to prepare this in individual dishes, because it's difficult to serve up scoops of lentils and keep the nice rounds of softened goat cheese looking nice on top. Individual casseroles topped with cheese could be popped in the oven for the cheese to melt.
Somehow the warm lentils with vinaigrette seemed a bit odd. I really wanted them to be tepid or cooler, but then it would be difficult to arrange for the melted cheese.
The flavors were nice enough, but it wasn't very attractive served.
I made a long half recipe (had a jar with 9oz lentils left); this amply served two as a main course. |
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