Like all good breakfast recipes, Rebar’s Orange Yogurt Hotcakes are easy, tasty, and filling. This recipe uses ingredients that you probably have in your pantry and fridge, so it’s great to serve on a lazy weekend when you don’t want to head out for groceries.
We made a few substitutions to the recipe to fit what we had lying around. Vanilla yogurt took the place of plain yogurt, and we used whole wheat flour to add a little bulk to the hotcakes. We kept the orange zest, which really adds a freshness to the meal. We didn’t have any fresh raspberries, but we did have some frozen ones from last season that we heated to make a little sauce.
Like most Rebar recipes, this one provides restaurant-sized servings. As written, the recipe says it serves 2-3 people, though the half batch we made yielded 6 medium-sized pancakes (enough for 2 people) – something to keep in mind, but it’s never a bad thing to have a few extra pancakes at brunch.
When having friends over for a hearty meal, it’s hard to beat lasagna, and Rebar’s Lasagna Rio Grande takes it in a new direction. Smoky, cheesy, and a little bit spicy, this dish is probably my favourite lasagna recipe of all time.
The layers of this lasagna consist of cheese, cilantro pesto, smoky tomato sauce, roasted vegetables, and noodles. The cilantro pesto, which tested our blender (2 whole bunches of cilantro! Be sure to remove the stems, or you’ll end up with a stringy mess.) but tasted great, was both fresher and less oily than regular pesto and would make a great topping for other pasta dishes. The smoky tomato sauce, with red chile flakes, chili powder, and chipotle puree (a go-to Rebar ingredient) was simple to prepare, and would also make a great standalone pasta topping.
The vegetable layers were hearty, with several roasted red peppers, a few pounds of zucchini, and a couple bunches of chard. We added a bit of spinach to this, and ended up reserving some of the zucchini – it was the only way we could fit the lasagna into our pan! There is a lot of cheese in this recipe as well (something we didn’t hold back on), but it only works out to about a half-cup per serving. Not quite diet food, but really not bad for a lasagna.
There’s a fair amount of work in this recipe, but a lot can be done in advance. We prepared the cilantro pesto filling the night before. Everything else we made just before assembly, but in the future we’ll likely make the tomato sauce and roasted veggies a day ahead as well. There’s also a lot of room for variation here – adding more or less heat by experimenting with chiles, substituting different types of cheese, or throwing in an unexpected vegetable (squash would be great!) are all ways to make this recipe your own.
We served this lasagna with Rebar’s Southwest Caesar Salad, which will be covered in an upcoming Cook the Book post.
Spring is here, which means it’s time to put away hearty winter soups and stews, but it would be a shame to do so before trying this delicious bean and kale soup. The soup is simple both in terms of ingredients (cannellini beans, tomato, kale, and spices) and preparation. Making the whole thing from scratch using dried beans takes about an hour, but you can shave about 20 minutes off of that if you use canned beans like we did.
Because this isn’t a complicated recipe, using high-quality, fresh ingredients will make even more of a difference than it usually does. The organic kale we used was especially tasty, as was the rosemary, but if we had made this a little later in the season we could have used some heirloom tomatoes instead of the called-for romas. We ended up cooking the canned beans a bit longer than called for, but this served to thicken the broth which would otherwise be a bit thin.
I was a bit concerned about the seasoning for this soup until the very last step, which involves adding some balsamic vinegar. This totally transforms the soup, and really gives it a unique character. Another nice touch is the suggestion of adding orzo, which helped make the soup a bit more hearty, although the recipe could have been a bit more explicit as to when to add it (~15 minutes before the end worked for us). We deviated from the recipe a bit in that we added some spinach that we had laying around, and we skipped adding the suggested drizzle of olive oil to the final prepared dish, but other than that this recipe was easy to follow and had no surprises.
Like most entries in the Rebar cookbook, this soup made far more than the suggested serving size (we got about 12 servings instead 8). This may be the last hearty soup that we make until the cold weather comes again, but luckily there are plenty of leftovers so we’ll be able to enjoy a few more bowls of this delicious soup.