So, the pick this week was for #34, which for me happened to be the Moosewood Restaurant's Low-Fat Favorites.
Out of the 25 cookbooks I own, 7 are vegetarian. Vegetarian, however, does not always mean healthful and lowfat, so I bought this cookbook in an attempt to find more low-fat vegetarian recipes. As I said earlier, I'm still not quite sure what I think about this cookbook, but I'm not ready to give up on it.
I chose this recipe - Mushroom Wheat Berry Pilaf - because my recipe repetoire is lacking in interesting side dishes and I have never cooked with wheat berries before. At first I didn't think I would be able to make this recipe tonight after all - it called for soaking the wheat berries for at least 8 hours and then cooking them for at least one more hour. Different sites on the internet said different things, most indicating that wheat berries could take hours to cook, thus the suggested soaking time. To make it more confusing, the bag I bought - simply labeled whole wheat (I had to make and educated guess that this was the same thing as wheat berries) - had no cooking instructions whatsoever. I had hoped to cook both the wheat berries and the brown rice in my rice cooker, but I decided to cook the wheat berries on the stove and put them on in the afternoon, just in case they really did take hours to cook. As it turns out, they only took one hour to become tender, so I really could have cooked them in the rice cooker along with the brown rice and will do so next time.
The rest of the recipe came together easily and it turned out quite well. I don't know if I'd call the recipe fantastic, but it was quite good and we really enjoyed the chewy texture of the wheat berries - I look forward to including them in more rice dishes and perhaps even a stew.
The wheat berry salad wasn't the only new dish we tried tonight. I stocked up on chicken thighs at Sam's Club not too long ago, but haven't made anything using them recently. I decided on a recipe from Cooking Light that seemed simple, yet tasty. It was very easy and quite good. Again, not a knockout recipe, but very good. The boys loved it.
Along with the chicken and rice, I served roasted green beans tossed with chopped kalamata olives, crumbled feta cheese, salt and pepper.
To wrap things up, Cookieee has posted the number for this week's SGOTW and it's 121. For me, this means my Sunset Vegetarian Cooking and I've already picked a recipe. I won't say what yet as it will be a very busy week and there are no guarantees that I'll even get around to it, but I certainly hope to. If you'd like to rediscover the cookbooks on your shelf, I invite you to join in. Join us on the CLBB on this thread and if you have a blog, send me your link and I'll post it, along with my recipe, next Sunday.
Hi, first time visitor here! You have a really lovely blog! The Pilaf looks delicious!
ReplyDeletep.s. your pup is adorable too!
Freya - Thanks and thanks for stopping by. :) Looks like there's a cute pup on your blog too - too funny sitting at the table!
ReplyDeleteI love wheat berries - we made a chili with them a couple weeks ago.
ReplyDeleteMy SGOTW picks the last several weeks just have not worked out for me. The last two weeks the picks have landed on my canning/preserving cookbooks, and its hardly the time of year for that! This weeks pick landed on The Barbecue Bible, which is good in theory,except that we're expecting a snowstorm later tonight!!
ReplyDeleteOne of these weeks I'll get back to the game, I enjoy it, and I've already weeded one out of my collection because of it.
This Mushroom Pilaf looks delicious. I wish I would actually be at home someday to cook dinner because I could see it go perfectly with a Bacon Wrapped Pork Tenderloin
ReplyDeleteJoe - We really liked them and I look forward to trying them in different ways!
ReplyDeleteErika - You could just generate another random number if the number picked doesn't work for you. Yes, it's not really time for canning!
Dani - Hope you get a break from cooking to do some cooking! ;)