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.

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.

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.

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.

Like most of the recipes we’ll make, we substituted canned black beans for dried beans. Because the beans are so prominently featured in this recipe, I may use dried beans if I make it again, but the canned beans still produced a flavourful soup. To compensate for the pre-cooked beans, we cooked the soup base (garlic, onion, jalapeño, spices) a little less than specified, just until the onion had softened.

This recipe gets a lot of its flavour from the Rebarbeque sauce it uses. Rebar’s take on BBQ sauce takes under an hour to make, can be made in large batches, and stores up to 3 weeks in the refrigerator – a perfect recipe for summer. For the bottle of dark beer in the Rebarbeque sauce I used a porter that I helped make in my local beer brewing club. The BBQ sauce was dark, rich, and complex, and is definitely something I’ll make again – it was great on veggie burgers, chicken, and pork…pretty much anything. Those of you that are sensitive to spicy food should probably use half (or less) of the chipotle purée that’s called for.

This soup also gets a nice kick with the optional garnish of mango salsa, another Rebar recipe. We used a jalapeño instead of the serrano that’s called for, mostly because that’s what we’d picked up at the store, although the substitution would work well for anyone that can’t handle the heat of a serrano. As is true with most Rebar recipes, add the heat slowly and you’ll most likely find yourself stopping long before you reach the recommended amount.

A quick and easy soup is a great thing – all the satisfaction of digging into a hearty bowl of soup, but easy enough to prepare after coming home from work. Rebar’s Black Bean Soup is one such soup, and definitely one that I’ll have again.

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.

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.

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.