And the last of this week's 6 meals: Southern Spoonbread from Purple Carrot. The meal kit provided ingredients for a corn spoonbread, a tomato and black-eyed pea gravy, and sautéed swiss chard.
And it's Purple Carrot's first mistake with us: the tomato-black-eyed-pea-gravy called for 1/4 cup of vegan cream cheese but it was missing from our box. Now, I'm usually very, very good at checking ingredients before I start cooking but this time I rushed to start cooking when I saw the spoonbread needed to bake for 30 minutes. So I was halfway through the recipe when I discovered the missing ingredient. And I sure don't have that on hand! Looked for a substitute and didn't even have yogurt or anything. So, I had to make quick trip to the store mid-recipe while the spoonbread baked. They only had Tofutti vegan cream cheese (which I consider only so-so) so I got real cream cheese.
I also added real bacon to the swiss chard. We actually DO often have veggie bacon on hand (we like veggie 'meats'. A lot), but had recently used the last of ours up. Also, this morning I was at Whole Foods and saw cooked okra and shallots on the hot prepared food bar and thought it would be perfect with dinner. So that's the veggie on the back of the plate.
This dish has problems and significant promise. The gravy was exceedingly rich. Maybe vegan cream cheese would be better! The spoonbread needs a bit of work. They didn't tell you what size pan to use, but from their photo it looked like theirs was in a small lodge skillet, so I used an 8" one. To get a crust on the bottom, I preheated the skillet with oil while the oven was coming up to temp, and then added more oil before adding the batter (this worked, see photo). After 30 minutes, the center was still very liquid and had a taste of raw flour. It's supposed to be custardy, but the flour needs to be cooked. So I let it go for a total of about 42 minutes. Maybe their pan was bigger than 8".
Despite the problems with the spoonbread, we'd probably get this again!
Ready for the coming week, with 9 meals: Sun Basket, Purple Carrot (TB12), and Blue Apron. Liamsaunt, did you make your asparagus pesto pasta yet?
