Well hello there blog buds!
In the food blog world, we are all bombarded with photos of beautiful creations and fabulous recipes. Does that ever make you feel inadequate in the kitchen? It does me, I’ll tell you that! (It also makes me feel inadequate as a photographer!)
So today I thought it might be fun to show you something that I thought was going to be this amazing idea only to have it just not pan out in reality. (Truth be told, this happens more often than you might imagine!)
I’ve been carrying around this idea in my head that I wanted to make a vegan enchilada using a leafy green in lieu of tortillas to lighten it up a bit. When I was little my mom used to make great cabbage rolls (why oh why didn’t I hang out more in the kitchen when she used to cook?) so I thought I’d take the idea of a cabbage roll but make it more of a Mexican style dish.
Sounds good so far, right?
Well, rather than the usual blah green cabbage, I decided to use red cabbage. And to contrast that, I thought I’d use a green enchilada sauce. Can you just picture the bright red of the cabbage with the green sauce? Doesn’t that sound pretty?
So I steamed up a whole head of red cabbage (to make the leaves more pliable) and set it aside to cool:
I made a filling out of tofu, lentils, mushrooms, onions, celery, spices:
Then I stuffed the leaves and rolled them up:
And this is when things just started to go downhill. First, the color of the cabbage was greatly diminished in the steaming so I no longer had that vibrant burgundy color. Now it was just on the other side of blue.
Additionally the pigment of the steamed cabbage was staining everything just like beets do! My fingernails looked like I’d been working on my car’s engine! NOW I see why I wasn’t finding many red cabbage rolls online!
Next, the sauce I chose was one by Rick Bayless. (He’s wonderful at Mexican cuisine – I’m not above using a quality premade sauce sometimes!)
For the record, I’ll tell you the sauce is delicious (so are the other sauces of his that I’ve tried). BUT – when I looked more closely at the ingredients, it DID contain milk (so much for my vegan enchiladas!) and the color was … well … NOT very green.
I topped it with Daiya vegan cheese and baked.
Overall, I was a little disappointed only because the LOOK of them wasn’t nearly as vibrant as I’d had in my mind. And the cabbage just didn’t compare as a shell vs. the corn tortilla. BUT the stuffing turned out great and I’ll use the lentil/mushroom/tofu combo again in something else. I made a little side salad out of jicama and served it up (on Cinco de Mayo actually):
So there you have it. Not everything turns out “chef-tastic” in the FitFeat kitchen! I’ll go back to the drawing board and come up with something else that might work along these lines and try again. But you have to give things a try because you just never know when you’ll make something that surprises you!
Like this easy snack:
In lieu of my usual almond butter, I smeared a little fresh avocado on my Ezekial toast the other day and topped it with dried cranberries and a sprinkle of hemp seeds! It was a really fun contract of color AND taste. I bought a bag of dried cranberries the other day to use in a recipe test for a client meal, and I’ve been adding the leftovers to all kinds of things. I even made a little ‘trailmix’ of roasted wasabi soybeans and cranberries! Sounds crazy but it ended up working!
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A BIG thank you to Joan (of the delightful and immensely informative gardening/beekeeping blog I’m in the Garden Today) for the wonderful gift of homegrown Organic Garlic Powder – her sister grows her own garlic and then even makes her own garlic powder! It’s wonderful – thank you Joan for the thoughtful treat! I’m enjoying using it in my cooking!
Have a great day friends!
– Shari B. =)
I always have grand ideas for cooking! If we have GORGEOUS weather that day, it may all get thrown out the window so that we can get outside for a hike!
