I often see pasta as an easy out when it comes to meal time – cook some pasta, throw on some sauce from a jar, and you’re good to go. However, while it’s good for a lazy meal at home, the tomato-sauce-on-spaghetti trick doesn’t exactly impress dinner guests.
The Rebar Linguine recipe took a bit longer than canned sauce, but it’s a dish that you won’t hesitate to serve to company. The roasted vegetables, especially the fennel, really gave an earthy element to the dish, and the texture could easily be varied based on how finely the vegetables are chopped. Balsamic vinegar added a tangy finish to the dish.
Although our usual fare is dry pasta, we went with fresh spinach linguine for this recipe. This further enhanced the earthy taste and was definitely a good choice. Other types of flavoured pasta would put a different spin on things – next time we’ll be going with sun-dried tomato – but the assorted vegetables and generous amount of basil ensures that the Rebar Linguine would be excellent even with a relatively plain dried whole-wheat pasta.
After picking up some fresh local bell peppers from the farmer’s market, we hit the Rebar cookbook to see what would do them justice. The Border Paella looked easy and like something that would provide ample leftovers, so we put down the cookbook and got to chopping.
Quite a while was spent prepping, which shouldn’t have surprised us – this is a large dish that’s comprised mostly of finely chopped vegetables that we’ve made before – but the smell of the simmering onions, peppers, garlic, and spices were enough to convince us again that this recipe was a winner. Since we like a little more heat, we added some chipotle purée along with hot smoked paprika which turned out nicely, but stick to just the called-for sweet paprika if you don’t like the spicy. Although this dish doesn’t require any great culinary skill, it can take a bit of time, both for the chopping and for the cooking of the arborio rice.
After the dish was complete, we managed to resist the enticing smells long enough to follow the optional serving suggestion presented in the book: bell peppers stuffed with paella. We had two peppers of uneven size, so we cut them in half first and topped them off with a bit of goat feta before baking.
We’ll definitely make this recipe again, especially since the leftovers are at least as good as the original meal. Next time we may use a cheese that’s a bit more prone to melt (the feta was still solid after 15 minutes in the oven), but other than that and the optional heat, we wouldn’t change anything about this recipe.
Most of the Asian food that we cook ends up being a simple stir fry, but Rebar’s Pad Thai offers a chance to get a little fancier without adding too much complexity. Quick, easy, and open to substitutions, this is definitely a recipe we’ll be cooking again.
Like any good stir fry, this recipe lends itself well to mise en place. Lacking any fish sauce, we added a bit of Worcestershire to punch it up a bit – definitely not a traditional Thai sauce. Once we had all the ingredients chopped, blanched, roasted, and seared, we started the stir fry, and in about 10 minutes we were done. It was really that easy!
We used egg noodles instead of the suggested rice noodles, as our local grocery place only had the former (another blow to authenticity!). This dish could easily be made vegan by omitting the eggs (and replacing the fish sauce with soy or black bean sauce), but the eggs lent a wonderful texture to the dish and mellowed out the garlic and chile nicely. Even though we halved the recipe (which is supposed to serve 4-6), we got at least 4 reasonably sized portions out of it, and it’s a good thing – we’ll want more of this soon. This is the first time we’ve ever made this particular recipe, but it could easily become a regular in our weeknight repertoire.
Phyllo is an ingredient that can be a pain to work with, but it can result in wonderfully savory dishes. Such is the case with the Roasted Vegetable Strüdel – this recipe takes a bit of patience and concentration, but the meal(s) it makes are definitely worth it.
A strüdel is basically a burrito made with phyllo instead of tortillas, and as such it is very amenable to additions and substitutions. We kept most of the recipe intact, including the pine nuts between layers of phyllo (which gave the final product a wonderful texture), but we left out the bocconcini cheese and the Japanese eggplant that the recipe calls for. We added in a few ingredients from another strüdel recipe we found, including some tofu for protein and some dill for a little extra kick.
This strüdel takes a fair amount of work, as there are a lot of veggies to be chopped, and the assembly of the strüdel can be quite time sensitive (phyllo dries out very quickly, becoming practically useless if proper measures aren’t taken). If you have the patience, though, you will be well rewarded – these rolls are hearty, healthy, and like all Rebar recipes, huge. They can also keep (pre-baking) in the fridge overnight, so if you’re okay with strüdel two days in a row (and I know that I was) consider making an extra one.