Sunday, October 11, 2015 – Last week, the challenge was full of meat. It’s only fitting that this week’s challenge is entirely vegetarian.
My friend Fenella chose chard, pumpkin, green beans, parsley,and tomato. And she’s a vegetarian, so the subtext was the dish had to be vegetarian. And a salad was too obvious, so not a salad.
After thinking about it for a bit, I decided the pumpkin would be the star of the show, and that I would roast it like I would any other kind of squash. The chard would make a good bed for the pumpkin to sit on. The green beans I would saute and top the pumpkin with that. For the tomatoes and parsley, I took inspiration from Chef Watson (specifically, the tomato relish on the scallops) and decided to use the tomatoes and parsley with some shallots as a relish on top of the whole thing.
Pictured above: Rainbow chard is weird, man. Do these come from the same plant or different plants?
Anyway, the recipe…
Ingredients
1 roma tomato, finely chopped
1 small shallot, finely chopped
1 Tbsp parsley, finely chopped
1 Tbsp white balsamic vinegar
small pumpkin, sliced into 1-inch wedges
green beans
chard
olive oil
salt
black pepper
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 400 F.
- Coat the pumpkin and green beans in olive oil, pepper, and a little bit of salt.
- (Optional) Grill the pumpkin, just enough to get grill marks.
- Roast the pumpkin until tender, about 20 minutes.
- Blanch chard for about 2 minutes.
- Saute green beans until soft and toasted, about 2 minutes.
- Mix tomato, shallots, parsley, vinegar, and a pinch of salt and pepper. Set aside.
- To plate, spread chard over plate, then pumpkin, then green beans, then top with the tomato relish.
First of all, pumpkin is really tough to cut through. Be careful not to injure yourself! Also, teh intarwebs says it’s easier to cut and peel pumpkin if you microwave it for a couple minutes. This is enough to get the outside edge soft, so that the skin comes right off, but barely cooks the pumpkin (if it all). That and pumpkin just isn’t available all year round. I know this might be cheating, but if I were to do it again, I’d substitute something easier to work with, like a butternut squash.
Also, 20 minutes in the oven was a bit overcooked for the pumpkin. It wasn’t burned or anything, but it was super mushy. On the flip side, the green beans were so undercooked, they were mostly raw. Clearly, 2 minutes isn’t enough for the green beans. Maybe 5 minutes? Plus, I only cooked them on one side, and you can barely see grill marks, so maybe 3 minutes each side?
Also, I blanched the chard, because that’s my preferred method for cooking vegetables. (Or boiling, for things that take a while to cook.) If you’re concerned about losing nutrients to the boiling water, steaming the chard would be fine. I’ve been told that raw chard is a little bitter, so I wouldn’t recommend leaving it raw.
To be honest, I didn’t like it. I mean, it didn’t taste bad. The flavors were all there. I guess I’m just not a fan of vegetables. (It prolly didn’t help that the green beans were undercooked. Or I had too many of them.) Maybe next time I should put a vinaigrette on it. I mean, I already have olive oil and vinegar in my ingredient list. (Although that would make this not-salad even more salad-like.)
At least it looks pretty.