Scrappy cooking, or cooking outside the lines, is a fun approach to getting a meal on the table. This is the style you will find I dream about dinner by Ali Slagle. I went through my review copy. The recipes aim to give “just enough structure to guide you to excellent meals, in your kitchen, your way”. They should all take no more than 45 minutes to prepare and ten or fewer ingredients. What I always enjoy in a cookbook is the offering of alternatives for swapping out ingredients or making small changes, and those suggestions abound throughout the book. The recipes are written to guide you through the entire process of preparing each dish. So instead of asking for a ready-made ingredient in the list, only the item itself is listed and all prep work is detailed in the instructions. The goal is to prevent you from seeing a short recipe and not realizing everything that requires several minutes of attention before you can begin. I only have a small problem with the way the ingredient lists are written: there are no quantities in the lists. You have to read the recipe to find out how much of each ingredient is needed. But otherwise I enjoy this “quick and easy way of cooking”. I might have had a thing for eggs lately, but I wanted to try everything in the Eggs chapter. The fried egg salad is a mix of vegetables with a leaning towards escabeche with salad to which chopped fried eggs are added. Alternative routes include a romaine lettuce with chickpeas braised in olive oil or a Thai salad. I had to try the Crispy Potato, Egg, and Cheese Taco because this combo can never go wrong. Shredded potatoes were fried in rounds of butter to match the tortillas; grated cheese was sprinkled on top; and an egg was boiled on top of the cheese. It was easy and beautiful. The Beans chapter is fun too. I’ve had my eye on the Big Beans with Breadcrumbs, which sees jumbo beans browned in oil in a hot pan before adding buttered panko crumbs and cooking until they coat the beans, which are then served with dressed salad leaves. The other chapters include Pasta, Grains, Vegetables, Chicken, Beef, Pork and Lamb, and Seafood. I made the Sticky Chicken with Pickles, and it’s a deliciously quick and delicious take on teriyaki. Alternatives are preparing with tofu or salmon and adding vegetables. I intend to do all of these things. The Tomatillo Poached Cod is like a streamlined pozole. I actually made dried corn porridge instead of using canned one, but it was still a very accessible dish with great flavor. And one recipe tip I’ll be using again and again from now on is to add shredded zucchini to ground chicken for burgers. However, the dish I want to tell you more about is Blistered Peppers with Mozzarella and Croutons.
I had many different sized local peppers to use in this dish. The peppers, some chopped and others just destalked in my case, were oven cooked in olive oil with garlic, smoked paprika and red pepper flakes in a Dutch oven until the peppers blistered. Next, almonds were chopped and tossed with pieces of bread and olive oil. The mixture was seasoned with salt and pepper and baked until golden brown. Some of the excess oil from the peppers was poured over the bread and almonds, and chopped garlic and sherry vinegar were also added. Lastly, fresh mozzarella was cut into chunks and layered with peppers, chickpeas, croutons and almonds on a serving platter.
This dish was a delightful blend of flavors and textures. And, like all other recipes, it came with great ideas to reuse in others. The idea of using warm excess oil from the peppers to flavor the croutons and almonds could apply to so many other dishes. And that’s the intention here. The recipes encourage experimentation and are delicious at the same time.
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