Recipe of the Month: Spicy Orange Broccoli

This holiday season, I acquired not one but two new vegan cookbooks. My mom gave me Anything You Can Cook, I Can Cook Vegan by Richard Makin, which I became interested in after trying his whipped cream recipe. (It didn't quite work, but it came closer than any of the numerous attempts we've made with coconut milk, aquafaba, or a combination of the two.) That one, as the name suggests, focuses on plant-based versions of animal-food favorites like chicken nuggets, grilled cheese, and (since the author is a Brit) sausage rolls. Some of the recipes in that one look pretty complicated, but we can probably get a lot of mileage out of simpler ones like Blender Bean Burgers and Cannellini Gnocchi with Pesto. There's even an instant mac and cheese powder that might work better than the disappointing one we tried from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken. 

The other cookbook, Everyday Happy Herbivore by Linsday S. Nixon, looks even more promising. I bought this one myself during our annual pilgrimage to Half Price Books in Indianapolis. Its focus is fat-free or extremely low-fat vegan dishes—so extreme that it labels some recipes as "cheater" dishes because they contain peanut butter, which seems to me like taking things a bit too far. But regardless, there are lots of interesting ideas in here, from Charleston Grits to Apple Fritter Cups.

Our first pick out of this book was a simple dish called Spicy Orange Greens. This recipe can be made with any type of greens or, alternatively, with broccoli florets, which is the option that we chose. The veggie of choice gets cooked until just wilted with a simple sauce made from water, soy sauce, fresh ginger, red pepper flakes, and orange marmalade, then served over soba noodles. 

We had most of these ingredients on hand, but we didn't have any orange marmalade, and we couldn't find any at Lidl. Rather than spring for a pricey jar at the local Superfresh just to pull out a tablespoon for this dish, Brian decided to try whipping up his own using a recipe from Tastes Better from Scratch. After half an hour of simmering, he had a chunky mass somewhat stickier than commercial marmalade, but close enough to use in the recipe. Along with the homemade marmalade, he made two other minor changes: replacing low-sodium soy sauce with regular (since that's what we'd had) and adding some diced tofu, since the recipe was otherwise lacking in protein.

The resulting dish was very pretty to look at, but it fell a bit short on flavor. With two tablespoons of fresh ginger and a quarter-teaspoon of red pepper flakes, the "spicy" part came through just fine; it was the "orange" that was lacking. Maybe it was the homemade marmalade, or maybe it was the fact that it was spread out over a larger volume of food thanks to the addition of the tofu, but to both of us, the recipe had no discernible orange flavor. I had to stir another spoonful of the marmalade—at least half a tablespoon—into my bowl to get what seemed like a reasonable level of orange. To orange-ify the whole panful of greens and tofu, we'd probably have needed at least three tablespoons—three times what the recipe called for. 

Fortunately, that's not a difficult change to make, and with that slight adjustment, this could be quite a useful recipe. Since most of the ingredients are usually in our pantry or fridge, keeping a jar of marmalade on hand (homemade or store-bought) will allow us to trot it out as a last-minute supper for nights when we're not sure what to make. (Alternatively, Brian thinks we might be able to make a sufficiently orangey sauce by leaving out the marmalade and replacing the water with orange juice. But that's an adjustment we'd have to experiment with to get it right.)

If this dish is any indication, we can probably expect this cookbook to be useful overall, but in need of a little tinkering to get the recipes just right. We'll get another chance to test it out shortly, as Brian is currently cooking up a more complicated one from the same cookbook: the intriguing-looking "Chickpea Tenders," which are designed to take the place of a chicken cutlet. I'll let you know how that one turns out in a future post.