Recipe Review from 8/09

Needless to say, my recipe reviews have all but fallen by the wayside! It's hard to post about new recipes when all I've been eating are salads because the lettuce and Swiss chard are ready to harvest now!

So it's been variations on a Cobb Salad, a Blueberry and Spicy Pecan Salad with Maple dressing, and the Falafel recipe below.

But one cannot live on salads alone in my opinion! So here's a couple recipes I've made in between.

Grilled Veggie Pasta (Penzeys Spices, Harvest 2009)
Recipe can be found here: Penzeys Spices

This is one of those "use what you have on hand" recipes. Grill the veggies, toss with the pasta, sprinkle with vinegar before serving. Seriously, summer vegetables just don't get any better than this.


Falafel with Tomato Salad (Fine Cooking, Aug/Sept 09, pg 90)
Recipe can be found here: Fine Cooking

I somehow ended up with four cans of chickpeas in my cupboard (not that that's a bad thing) and after making regular hummus and a red pepper hummus, I was looking for something different. I happened to pick up a copy of Fine Cooking and there was a recipe for falafel. Perfect!

I did a few modifications - I served the patties over a salad instead of stuffing into pitas. And the "coarsely chop" ended up being a bit more pureed so they were more cookie dough consistency than crumbly. Which was fine.

I also made a simple tadziki sauce of yogurt, cucumbers and some Greek seasoning (from Penzeys). These modifications were enough that I got four servings out of this dish.

Fish Tacos (based off of two recipes from Culinary in the Country Blog)

Fish part came from here: Spicy Fish Tacos with Chipolte Sauce

And the filling part came sort-of from here: Fish Tacos with Broccoli Slaw

Instead of broccoli slaw, I used regular cabbage. My fish was halibut, and I cut it into nuggets and breaded it before baking. I thought the breading came out rather dry, and I've had that problem before with certain breading, so overall, these were just okay. I'd like to try fish tacos again using the shrimp taco recipe from a month ago.