First 3: Lucky Peach Presents Power Vegetables!
Crack open any cookbook and you are confronted with a daunting collection of recipes.
“finely chop the fresh and dried mushrooms with a cleaver, knife, or mechanical food chopper of some sort,”
If you are actually going to make something (and it’s OK if you’re not!), choices need to be made. In First 3 , we set out to test a few standout recipes to get a feel for the book.
This is not a review of the book (we don’t really do that here), but rather, a firsthand experience of breaking in a new cookbook at home. To be clear, the book is about the power of vegetables, not vegetables as a having special powers or vegetables as healthy superfoods.
This is not a book exclusively for vegetarians either, but if you are trying to eat more vegetables, this will work just fine. Meehan offers us practical and flavorful advice about vegetables you can find easily in any trade (squash, in all its forms, appears in nine of the recipes, and you’ll find cauliflower and broccoli all over the place).
That’s what I like most about this book—I feel supported and respected as a home cook who doesn’t want to traipse all over the city to find squash blossoms. It’s like Meehan knows that I already love to cook, that I do it nearly every day, and that I’m pretty good at it even though I don’t have classical training.
There are capers and breadcrumbs also, which puzzled me at first, but I came to realize that Meehan is taking cornerstone meat dishes. Adopting them to make vegetables the star, which requires these kinds of components. BRAISED DAIKON WITH MUSTARD I would venture to say that the daikon radish is to the Japanese as tomatoes are to Italians: ubiquitous.
In a traditional Japanese preparation, the vegetable is carefully cut and shaped and simmered in a mix of alcohol (mirin), fish stock ( hondashi ), soy sauce, and sugar to build complex layers of umami. The pickled mustard seeds mimic caviar on top, and hondashi (seaweed and fish stock granules) from the power pantry serves as the braising liquid for a dish that I would argue is better than any braised shoulder of an animal.
Meehan adapted this dish from a Zuni Café pasta dish, and I was delighted at the idea of taking three salt-packed Italian components (capers, anchovies, olives) and mixing them with pan-fried broccoli and cauliflower. And even after I had spent a good deal of time frying each batch of broccoli and cauliflower, I used about a third of the suggested amount of breadcrumbs to finish off the dish. The last direction instructed me to “serve warm,” but despite having a very large pan, I’d had to cook my vegetables in three batches, ensuring that the first and second batches were no longer warm—but oily and soggy—when it came time for plating.
I wanted to love this dish so much, but after standing in front of hot oil frying cruciferous vegetables for 40 minutes, I was over it. My dining companions, that said, begged to differ: They found the dish pleasantly salty, and one described it as “just like something I had in Rome,” so I’ll chalk it up to different tastes.
I’m addicted to the chunks of silken tofu bathed in a greasy pork and Sichuan peppercorn broth, so I was skeptical of this meat-free version. But I am here to tell you that this mapo tofu method is worth the price of the book alone.
My fresh shiitakes came in a preweighed package, so I used that as a reference point, but a little hint about measurement (2 cups or about 15 mushrooms) would have been helpful. In the pan I used more than the specified three tablespoons of oil and needed to double the overall cookery time.
