Recipes of the Month: Quinoa-Eggplant Salad and Black Bean Vegan Caprese

Last weekend, I mentioned to Brian that we would need to try a new vegan dish sometime this week if I wanted to get in my Recipe of the Month for August this weekend. He came through with not one but two new dishes, and I couldn't decide which one to cover. So rather than a detailed discussion of either one, I'm going to give you a quick rundown of both.

He discovered the first one by searching for recipes with eggplant and avocado, since we happened to have some of both that needed using up. Its name is a mouthful — Grilled Eggplant Quinoa Avocado Salad — and it tells you most of what you need to know about the dish. The only things it doesn't mention are the Vidalia onion, also grilled, and the dressing, a blend of olive oil, lemon juice, Dijon mustard, salt, oregano, and honey. Which makes this recipe not technically vegan, but it would be easy to make it so by subbing in sugar or agave nectar.

Brian originally planned to grill the eggplant and onion over wood in our little outdoor grill, but when the time came to make the dish, it was just too hot outside. So instead, he gave them a quick shot in the broiler. The other change he made to the recipe was using about half an avocado instead of a whole one, since the other half of the one we had turned out to be spoiled. (Seriously, what is it with avocados these days? They seem to go from "hard as a rock" to "brown and squishy" in minutes without ever passing through "ripe.") Both these changes probably made the dish not quite as good as the original version, but a good enough approximation to evaluate it.

And our evaluation was...meh. There was nothing in it that didn't work, it just wasn't outstanding. And given that the combination of eggplant, onion, and a wood fire can also be used to make a truly fabulous sandwich, we don't see any reason to bother again with a dish that's merely okay.

The second dish wasn't a brand-new recipe but a variant on an old favorite, pasta a la Caprese. We've been making this with our homemade vegan mozzarella, but it wasn't altogether satisfactory because the fake mozzarella didn't melt like the real stuff. (It melts fine on a pizza, but the heat of the cooked pasta isn't quite enough.) We tried leaving out the cheese, and while the uncooked tomato-basil-garlic sauce was still quite tasty by itself, it was a bit lacking in substance. And now that I'm supposed to be keeping an eye on my blood sugar, a pasta dish with no protein wasn't ideal.

Brian had previously tried adding some white beans to the sauce to add protein, and while this worked okay, it didn't have the nice soft texture that the cheese used to supply. So I suggested subbing in some plain tofu, as in this vegan Caprese salad we tried a few years back. I figured if it was left to steep in the sauce for a good hour or three, it should have plenty of flavor, along with a texture very close to mozzarella.

However, rather than simply doing this with regular pasta, Brian decided to try another experiment: substituting in some "black bean spaghetti" we found at Ocean State Job Lot. Actually, this doesn't mean what we usually think of as black beans: according to the label, the sole ingredient in it is black soybeans. That makes this form of pasta absolutely loaded with protein: a whopping 25 grams per serving, as compared to only 20 grams of carbs and 10 grams of fiber. So, with two forms of soy in it, the dish was quite substantial indeed.

Unfortunately, these soy noodles turned out not to be the ideal medium for this sauce. First of all, a thin pasta like spaghetti isn't as good at holding the chunks of tomato as a shorter pasta like penne or rotelle. But also, the chewy texture and slightly nutty flavor of the soy noodles, though quite enjoyable on its own, wasn't an ideal background for the tomato-garlic-basil flavor of the sauce. It worked okay, but it wasn't quite as good as regular pasta or some of the other less starchy versions we've tried, like whole-grain or red lentil pasta. (Perhaps I'll fill you in on some of those in a future post.)

The tofu, on the other hand, worked pretty well. It hadn't picked up that much flavor from the sauce, but that may have been because the steeping time was a little on the short side. Given a full two hours or more, it would probably be excellent in both taste and texture.

So, in short, we think both these experiments were successful, just not in combination. We'll definitely try the tofu in our Caprese sauce again, this time with a longer steeping and a more appropriate type of pasta. And next time we're at Ocean State Job Lot, we'll plan to pick up another box or two of this soy spaghetti to experiment with. We think its nutty flavor would make an excellent foil for peanut or sesame noodles, or for any dish that's normally made with soba.