Southwestern Bean Cakes (with Mango Salsa)

¡Olé! For some reason I'm drawn to the "Spring" section of the book this week, as this dish comes from there as well. I try to have some type of Latin-flavored meal each week, because the spices and chiles are muy delicioso.

These bean cakes are pretty good, but once you add in the mango salsa, you have a very tasty meal. I'd recommend this dinner for a night when you're pressed for time. It doesn't take a lot to put it all together, and it only cooks for about 8 minutes. I needed to use a bit more corn meal, as the cakes were a little hard to flip. Must remember that for the future...

We're giving Jack Bishop's Southwestern Bean Cakes 3 stars. Very healthy, and tastes good, but putting the fork down was a bit too easy.

White Bean and Tomato Casserole with Bread Crumb Topping

Dinner FAIL! Well, you can see from the photo that the bread crumbs burned a bit. Jack said to broil the casserole for 2 to 3 minutes, but check to make sure it doesn't burn. I tried to look through the door after maybe 30 seconds, but realized that I couldn't see the top, so I opened the door, and the bread crumbs had already burned. Bummer.

I have never had success broiling anything. In fact, the first time I tried this dish years ago, I set the whole thing on fire. Those were fun times.

Let's start at the beginning. I wanted to do this correctly, so I made sure that I used good white bread (which we bought at the local farmers' market), and I took the time to dry out the bread and then process in my food processor to make the bread crumbs. All went perfectly well.

Next I cooked up the onion, tomato, garlic, thyme, and bean mixture per the instructions. Seasoned appropriately. Spread the seasoned bread crumbs over the mixture in the pan, put it under the broiler, and you know the rest.

The flavors were fine. Nothing to write home about, and you couldn't tell that the bread was burnt -- I guess I took it out in the nick of time. But, am I excited to eat the leftovers? Not so much. Tons of protein, hardly any fat, and vegetables to boot, so it's a nice healthy dish, but it's just... eh.

I'm giving it 2.5 stars. Tommie says 3, but he didn't take the time to do all the prep work. He's actually cleaning up the messy kitchen post-cooking, so I'll bet by the end he'll go with 2.5 as well. Too much work for just an average meal.

It had to happen one day: I don't really like this Jack Bishop dish. And on the same day the Canes lose another game to Virginia Tech. At least the Hip Hop Awards are on tonight. Yee-haw!!!!

Update: It tasted better as leftovers the next day. Worthy of 3 stars.

Butternut Squash and White Bean Stew

Does rosemary make everything taste delicious?

I'm so glad this stew turned out well, because I really dislike working with squash. Scooping out the seeds isn't so bad, but peeling it is just tiring. Whole Foods had a huge display of different varieties of squash this week, so we selected delicata to be different. The taste seems the same to me (in this stew at least) as butternut. Because the delicata is a smaller variety though, I felt like I had to do double duty prepping two rather than one big butternut squash.

Other ingredients include tomatoes, beans (I went with Great Northern), and onions, but the lead flavor was rosemary that I picked fresh from our garden. I love rosemary. Love it.

Tommie and I give this dish 5 stars. You burn some calories prepping the squash, but it's worth it.
(BTW, since this blog is about food, and not my crazy political views, we felt anonymity was less important, hence Hubby's name now being Tommie.)