Half Baked Harvest Every Day
Spiced Lentil Soup, Coq au Vin Blanc Meatballs, Mom's Pot Roast, Mongolian Beef
Hi Folks,
I’ve been following Half Baked Harvest on Instagram for many years, but it wasn’t until one of my clients bought her first cookbook (Half Baked Harvest Cookbook) that I really dove in to her recipes. What I discovered from her cookbook, and her well-designed website, is that she is really trying to adapt recipes for as many audiences as possible. If you want beef stew, she’ll tell you how to make it: on the stove, in the slow cooker, in the pressure cooker, and even in the oven! She will offer alternative ingredients as well just in case you cannot find what the recipe recommends.
Tieghan Gerard, the author behind Half-Baked Harvest has come under fire a few times for "culturally appropriating” recipes that maybe she shouldn’t lay claim to. It’s something that’s made me hesitant to write about this book, but at the same time — if someone makes her non-authentic version of a dish and likes it, and then they go to their local restaurant that serves that dish (made authentically) to try it for the first time and they still like it, isn’t that a win? Maybe I’m out of line or missing the point, and I am certainly not going to sit here and say cultural appropriation is ok, but I think there is sometimes a grey area in food between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation and sometimes food bloggers & cookbook authors cross into those murky waters from time to time.*
But I’m not here to start any kind of beef on the internet, I’m just here to tell you about some of the recipes I made from Half Baked Harvest: Every Day this past week & hopefully make you all a bit more brave in the kitchen — especially when tackling weeknight meals.
It was both easy and difficult to pick things to cook from this book. Easy because we wanted to make 70% of the recipes off the bat, difficult because we knew we had to narrow it down. After a month’s hiatus from “the books” & continuing to want to work through things we have on hand in our pantry & freezer, I knew we would have to pick recipes that “fit the bill.” Also with this book, I really wanted us to make things that were easy to whip up on a weeknight. We were gifted a pressure cooker/instant pot for our wedding, and we rarely use it (I used it a lot when I was still working as a private chef), so I knew I wanted to be able to use that a couple of times since Tieghan offers many pressure-cooker friendly recipes.
First up was the Spiced Lentil Soup with Curried Acorn Squash. Now you might be saying in your head, “Alyssa, it’s almost spring, where are you going to get an out-of-season winter squash?” Well, in Autumn I purchased a beautiful buttercup squash that I never ended up cooking and it had somehow survived the winter on my countertop — this recipe gave me the opportunity to cook the squash. We also had lentils on hand for the soup, so we really only needed a couple of additional ingredients to complete the recipe as (basically) written. One thing I’ve noticed with a lot of Tieghan’s recipes is that she loves to throw a bunch of baby spinach in them when she can / where it makes sense. I wish I liked the way spinach tasted by itself, but I really don’t, so mixing it into a flavorful soup like this is perfect for me. The book offers you to cook this on the stove, in the pressure cooker, or in the slow cooker. I needed the stove for another recipe I would be making for the next night, and I don’t have a large slow cooker (just a small one that I use for keeping cocktail meatballs or queso warm at parties), so it was time to dust off the pressure cooker.
If you’re afraid of cooking with a pressure cooker, you should set your fears aside… especially if you have an instant pot (which makes it so easy - just don’t over-fill it). I was afraid at first, too, but after reading a couple of tutorials online and learning about the mistakes people make that cause them to malfunction, I have been really careful when using my pressure cooker to make meals and haven’t had any issues. It is so nice to throw a bunch of ingredients in to a machine and let the machine do the work for you so you can be free to do other things. Another thing pressure cookers are great for is cooking dry beans — it’s what I use mine for the most since it works in about a third of the time they would cook on the stove. If you don’t have a pressure cooker, I am sure the stovetop method would work just as well!
The soup came together quickly, and the coconut milk at the end brought it all together. We served it with the roasted pieces of squash which added a nice bite and flavor to the dish, and some store-bought naan on the side was the perfect accompaniment.
While the soup was cooking away in the pressure cooker and the squash was safely in the oven, I worked on the Coq au Vin Blanc Meatballs that would be our dinner for the next evening. I figured meatballs in a sauce would be simple enough to re-heat the next day, and meatballs come easy to me since I make them often. I actually have my own recipe for Coq au Vin Meatballs that I used to make for my clients, but that recipe uses red wine.
The meatball mixture was simple, and once it was made I hit the ground running to cook the meatballs. We used turkey bacon instead of regular bacon which was fine, I’m sure regular bacon tastes better (if you eat pork), but the turkey bacon was a worthy substitute. We decided to serve these meatballs with pasta instead of potatoes since we knew we would be having potatoes later in the week.
The flavor of the dish was great and we were able to not only enjoy this for dinner, but also got a few lunches out of the leftovers. My only comment about this particular recipe is that it calls for milk, my milk split the second it hit the pan, and it did not turn in to the creamy sauce I think it was supposed to be. Coq au vin is a fairly creamy dish — for a dish that doesn’t have any cream — but I think that is due to the use of butter and flour in a beurre manie (a sort of raw roux that thickens liquids in a similar way as you cook it). I feel like I would make this again but perhaps I would leave out the milk and sub in a beurre manie to see if that made things a bit smoother.
When I looked at the recipe for her Mongolian Beef, I was trying to decide if I needed to do any prep the night before I was going to cook it. It turns out that the recipe is super simple to make — even on a weeknight! The recipe calls for broccolini and strip loin steaks, I couldn’t easily find either of those ingredients on my quick shopping trip, so I decided to use regular broccoli and sirloin steaks (obviously a bit pricier, but they do the trick ultimately). You essentially cook the strips of meat until browned and then set it aside, cook the broccolini, and then make the sauce in the pan, and add the meat and broccolini to the bubbling sauce to finish the dish!
Super simple, not a ton of prep involved, and it tastes really delicious. I had a little more meat and broccoli than she called for so we ate this for two dinners which was perfect during a busy week (also had a tiny bit of the dish and rice left over on the third day, so I made Mongolian beef & broccoli fried rice for breakfast, it was divine)! I followed the recipe basically as written, but since I was using regular broccoli instead of broccolini, I decided to prepare it how I like to prepare broccoli for stir fries since I knew it would do the trick. FYI: Mongolian Beef has nothing to do with Mongolia, according to the internet, the dish was invented in Taiwan but is mostly served in American Chinese restaurants!
Last, but certainly not least, I made her recipe for Mom’s Pot Roast. I really love a good pot roast recipe. It isn’t really something I grew up on, we were more of a beef stew/brisket household. I think the first time I genuinely thought about a pot roast was after I graduated college, I was working in a gourmet grocery store and one of my colleagues was telling me about the pot roast she had made and what she put in the dish in terms of veggies. It sounded so good. I immediately went to the store and bought a chuck roast to make my own for the first time. Since then, I have greatly improved my methods of cooking pot roast, but this pressure cooker version worked really well and it may have changed how I approach this simple dish forever.
The book offers you three methods for cooking: slow cooker, pressure cooker, and oven. While traditionally I would make mine in the oven, I was happy to utilize my pressure cooker once again because it would only take “1 hour”. It actually took closer to two hours once everything was prepped and in the pot, plus it takes time to build up the heat/pressure before your hour countdown begins and then you have to release the pressure at the end. About halfway through the “1 hour” of cooking time, I decided to serve something else for dinner and save the pot roast for the next night. Stews and stewed meats always taste better the next day anyway, and luckily we had a backup plan in place. I felt it was too ambitious to begin with, starting a pot roast at 5:15 PM on a weeknight thinking it would be done by 6:30 PM. If you have a slow cooker (Again mine is tiny and wouldn’t really work for this), you could definitely let this sit on your counter all day while you’re at work — low cook for 8 hours easy. You could do it in the oven overnight (if you feel comfortable doing that), or maybe if you get home early, you could accomplish it on a weeknight in the slow cooker. This recipe had a fairly simple flavor profile/gravy, but I’ve made all kinds of pot roasts over the year for clients: ranging from Italian flavors to Chinese flavors to Mexican Flavors… you can really have fun with what you add to flavor the meat and how you serve it too!
Since the flavor was simple, and since it is spring, I decided to make my mashed potatoes have a little zing! I had recently purchased some green garlic from the farmer’s market and knew I wanted to find an interesting way to incorporate it into our food. Green Garlic has a milder garlic flavor than the traditional shelf-stable garlic you buy at the store. It is only in season in Spring, and you can typically only find it at your local farmer’s market or in very speciality grocery stores that sell produce.
I have often modified mashed potatoes with caramelized onions or roasted garlic, so I decided to confit my green garlic in some olive oil for this version. Very simply: you chop up your green garlic and put it in a small pot with olive oil and simmer it until it is super soft and luxurious. You can strain out the green garlic bits to mix into the mashed potatoes, but don’t get rid of that olive oil! It has a delicious slightly garlicky flavor too that you can incorporate into your dishes as you please! I did use some of the garlic-flavored olive oil in the potatoes themselves (instead of your traditional stick of butter) and it worked really well!
We served the pot roast with some blanched snap peas, also from the farmer’s market, and it made two dinners and one lunch for each of us! I definitely would use the pressure cooker method again. The meat was tender and flavorful, the veggies (mushrooms and carrots) we added in were not overcooked, and it was rather quick… especially when I look back on times I’ve waited hours for a pot roast to be done in the oven.
I hope that you will try some of Tieghan’s recipes, either from one of her books or from her website. I really love these from her website, just in case you need a jumping off point:
Chicken Meatball Thai Inspired Soup
This week I also made Ratatouille for a food inspired by films potluck… Of course I forgot to take an “After” picture, but here is the before:
And I had a lot of squash and eggplant leftover so I made a vegetable tart with some caramelized onions on the bottom and feta we had leftover from another recipe on the top, and finished it off with some hot honey. The pastry is store-bought, I like to keep a box of puff pastry in the freezer just in case.
That’s all for now! Until next time…
Love & Happy Spatulas,
Alyssa
*If she’s done something really awful and I missed it, please point me in that direction, I would rather be educated about the issue than just shooting in the dark.
What a lovely post - makes me want to try each of these dishes!!!
The ratatouille was delicious. Thank you for sharing. :)