The Enchanted Broccoli Forest
Artichoke Sauce with Mushrooms // Inspiration Soup
Hello Enchanted Readers,
I picked up The Enchanted Broccoli Forest one day many years ago from a secondhand store when I spotted it on the cookbooks shelf. Usually when I look in secondhand bookstores for cookbooks I am looking for out of print books or unusual books. I’ve had many great finds (including an earlier edition of The Joy of Cooking) & cherish my secondhand cookbooks as much as my brand new cookbooks.
Mollie Katzen’s Cookbooks are literal works of art. Many of her cookbooks & books (Including the famous Moosewood Cookbook) are written entirely by hand & paired with whimsical illustrations on nearly every page. You won’t find full-color photos or step by step images in these books, but what you will find are some really unique vegetarian & vegan recipes!
I grew up with my parents cherishing their copy of Moosewood Cookbook. Every Thanksgiving my dad would pull it out to make the pumpkin pie (it’s a fantastic pumpkin pie with no processed sugar & we still make it every year), and the pages of the book are clearly food stained, with some pencil markings for recipe edits. When my parents moved in together just before getting married, they each had a wok & both loved to cook. It’s likely where my inspiration to cook came from, having two parents that were able to whip things up in the kitchen and enjoyed doing it!
You can only imagine that I was excited to cook from any book by Mollie Katzen after growing up with Moosewood Cookbook just out of reach on the shelf! Well, when I’m selecting recipes for this project, I start by looking through the whole book to see what catches my eye. Sometimes I look for recipes that will use a certain ingredient we have on hand, other times I’m looking for something show-stopping to serve for Shabbat on Friday evenings, and then other times I’m looking for recipes that use some of my favorite ingredients, hoping I’ll end up loving them.
When I started to flip through The Enchanted Broccoli Forest I initially picked 7-8 recipes I wanted to make & that sounded excellent. However, I ended up only making two recipes & the ingredients for both were extremely similar. I did want to make the recipe that the title is derived from which is essentially a baking dish of cheese-y rice with broccoli standing upright in it, but after reading some reviews of the recipe online, I thought maybe I’ll have to make it another time.
The recipes I did end up making were the Artichoke Sauce with Mushrooms & Greens (p107) & Inspiration Soup (p27). I made them on the same night but we ate them on different nights. Both recipes called for marinated artichoke hearts (an ingredient I love) & both recipes called for you to utilize the marinade right in the recipe instead of dumping it out! I was really excited about this inclusion of something most of us tend to throw out! It had me thinking and wondering about other brines and marinades that come in jars and how we can incorporate them into our cooking in a new and exciting way! I haven’t found myself with too many excess brines & marinades yet, but it’s definitely something I am going to keep in my mind.
For the pasta recipe the instructions were fairly easy to follow & the sauce came together quickly & simply! You know I cannot resist a tomato-free pasta sauce, so I knew I had to make it. Originally the recipe calls for Kale or Collard greens but suggests a sub of any leafy green (like chard, spinach or escarole) so I decided to substitute spinach which I prefer out of all those types of greens. Although the recipe is simple, it really has some nice layers of flavor, the mushrooms cooked with thyme and sage at the beginning really come through in the final finished product! At the last minute I decided to add the optional milk or cream because I had some on hand, open, in the fridge. We enjoyed this sauce with pasta for two meals!
The soup, similarly to the pasta sauce, came together quite easily. I liked the name more than anything, but wished there was a description on where the name came from. As I mentioned I made both recipes on the same night & we decided to eat the pasta first & the soup the next night. By the time we re-heated the soup the next day it wasn’t really as inspirational as we thought it might be. The potatoes in the soup had begun to disintegrate and the flavor was pretty bland. I actually didn’t want to eat it at all but my husband convinced me to blend it with the immersion blender & maybe that would solve our textural issues with the soup in it’s day-old weird state. If you’re going to make this soup, make it the same day you’re going to eat it & plan to eat the whole thing. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a soup that didn’t taste good the next day, so this was a first for me. We blended it up & it was a bit more edible, my husband really liked it, but I was done with it after a few bites.
I was kind of disappointed to have a “bad” recipe from this beautiful book & this sent me down a rabbit hole of seeing what other people think of these recipes. They really don’t hold up (according to the highly-critical internet). This is the reason why after two recipes I decided to stop. I won’t ever part with this book because it is too unique to give up, so maybe some day when I’m feeling bored & brave, I’ll attempt one of the other recipes I bookmarked, and find myself eating The Enchanted Broccoli Forest.
Love & Happy Spatulas,
Alyssa
PS: I will say that looking through and cooking from a vegetarian cookbook did heavily inspire my shabbat dinner that week. I was reminded of a dish I used to devour and order from this Italian restaurant that I loved when I lived in Oakland, the now closed Dopo on Piedmont avenue. The dish was just their market vegetable sides which changed (almost) daily. They always had three vegetable dishes which you could order a la carte or you could order them as a trio on a platter. So for shabbat dinner the week I cooked from this book I made Chicken Schnitzel with three vegetable sides.