Saturday, April 23 – 12:30pm

At the end of each event, we talk about the cookbook for the next one. And after stuffing ourselves last month with all of the rich goodness from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, we all kind of felt the need to cleanse. So in complete contrast, we went with Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty, which is a vegetable-focused cookbook. Ottolenghi is an Israeli-born British chef, known for creating Mediterranean-influenced recipes using fresh, seasonal ingredients, so his cookbook seemed like just what we were looking for.

The weather was starting to get good (to all my friends not in California – yes, I can see you rolling your eyes) and we were going to have a meal full of fresh, vibrant vegetables, so we decided this was a perfect event to do as a picnic in the park. We were experimenting with how to schedule these events for the best turnout, so made this one on a Saturday at 12:30 (the previous one was on a Sunday at 6:30pm).

The turnout was a very intimate group of 4. While we didn’t get the large number of last-minute flake-outs and no-shows that we’d experienced in the first event, we just had a super low number of RSVPs. In fact, Sheana even made her husband come to boost that tiny number. It was a bit discouraging and we feared that this cookbook club idea might be something that just wasn’t going to take off, but we persevered and were able to gain great momentum (more on that in later posts). It helped that we got a fair number of notes from people saying they were really excited to come to the next event, but just weren’t able to make this one because of prior commitments. 

Despite the small crowd, it was good company and great food. The advantage of a smaller group is that you get the chance to talk to everyone and really get to know people better. And once again, the food was tasty and went well together to make a nicely assembled meal without having to coordinate a lot ahead of time. In fact in this case, pretty much no advance coordination, as we didn’t even start posting our dishes until the morning of the picnic. Something we learned – make sure that the organizer posts their recipe choice further in advance to get the ball rolling! Somehow even with that miss though, it turned out to feel like a nicely balanced meal…

The Menu

Char-grilled Asparagus – Sheana

Alana: Sheana made the Char-grilled Asparagus. I’ve never come across a grilled asparagus I didn’t like, but add ricotta and lemon zest and well… yeah, count me in.

Sheana: I confess I chose this one explicitly because I could make it in no-time flat. I love grilled asparagus, but this take was a bit mild for me. Next time, I’d hit this with some lemon juice at the end to take it up a notch!

Cucumber Salad with Smashed Garlic and Ginger – Pontus

Alana: Pontus made the Cucumber Salad with Smashed Garlic and Ginger. I was going to make this if I didn’t made the Black Pepper Tofu, so I was excited he made it.  It was simple and tasty – I’ve added it to my recipe list.

Sheana: This was delish! It was super fresh and clean and I would love to make this again.

Stuffed Portabella Mushrooms – Robert

Alana: Robert made the Stuffed Portabella Mushrooms. I am not a vegetarian. I like meat. These served as the meat dish of the meal for me. So thumbs up.

Sheana: I love portabellas! So this was going to be a win for me no matter what. They would be even better fresh out of the oven, but they stood up well to travel.

Black Pepper Tofu – Alana

Alana: I made the Black Pepper Tofu. It’s peppery (hand-crushing 5 tablespoons of peppercorns made me late to the event!), and there’s a shocking amount of butter in this dish. Probably why it’s delicious. I’d make it again, maybe with chicken wings instead of tofu. Like I said, I like meat.

Sheana: 10 minutes before the event Alana frantically messages me that she was still crushing peppercorns! Her manual labor was well worth the effort. This was awesome (if not a bit too spicy for a wimp like me!).

The Verdict

While only a small sampling of the 120 recipes in this cookbook, I liked every dish. And as opposed to Julia Child’s book where it was fun to try but I won’t be making a regular habit, these were all recipes I would make again. They were pretty straightforward and felt like the kind of food I could eat on a day-to-day basis. Sheana had recently ditched her copy of Plenty More (the sequel to Plenty) because the ingredients were too obscure, so she was a bit reluctant to give this one a try. But this one was totally approachable! I guess it’s another case of a sequel that doesn’t live up to the original. Another note on this book – Plenty is filled with beautiful imagery, so even if you never cook a single recipe you might want to add it to your coffee table to impress guests and level-up your home decor. My takeaway – I see plenty of time with this book in my future.

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