Plated Weeks 5 & 6
Originally published at Soapturtle.net. Please leave any comments there.
(Edited to correct weeks because I dorked them!)
I had surgery (There will a post on this at some point later a few weeks from now, but not today!), and didn’t feel like sitting at the computer so, 2 weeks at one time again.
Week 5
Shmoo cooked the plated dishes for this week, with a little bit of input from me here and there in an advisory capacity.
Cheesy Beef Empanadas with Salsa Roja
So this was a mixed bag. The spinach salad, which we thought would be meh, was totally great. Super simple, but great. The Empanadas and Salsa Roja, not so much. Bland, but also Grease. Grease is the word, and we didn’t even have any Bee Gees in the house. The Salsa Roja itself, wasn’t a salsa, but it was red. The cheese and garlic in the empanadas, and the jalapenos in the salsa just didn’t come through in the end product. It was filling however, and it was good enough that we’ve already talked about how we’d retool this, and we intend to do so at a future point.
Changes we’d make:
-For the spinach salad, more black pepper, and maybe some thinly sliced red onion.
-For the empanadas, I want to use lime marinated skirt steak, and some cotija cheese, add some jalapeno, and maybe add some garlic powder instead of the crushed/diced garlic. The onion amount was sufficient.
-For the Salsa Roja, more tomatos or a can of diced tomatos, as there just wasn’t enough liquid at all. Double the amount of jalapeno, maybe up the onion and garlic a bit, or just use the garlic I am not using in the meat now for the salsa.
Seriously, that spinach salad…. YUM, and so unexpectedly good.
Cauliflower Bahn Mi Bowls with Srircha Mayo
We liked these too. Everything went well together and it was tasty. This was probably the best rice we’ve ever gotten from Plated. I could have done without the sweet potato in it and would have prefered chicken, but mostly we don’t have any problems with this dish at all.
Week 6
I cooked these!
https://www.plated.com/recipes/chicken-shawarma-with-tomato-cucumber-and-tahini
I liked this well enough, but shmoo didn’t really care for it. If I had put the plates together the way they are in the link above as opposed to the recipe card we were sent he probably would have liked it a lot better but as it was the pitas had too much stuff on them and it was too much tomato for him. Our dinner guest thought this was pretty good, and that the meat would be good that style in tacos. These weren’t bad, but they weren’t super great either, so I’d rank these somewhere in the middle of the pile we’ve tried so far. I could see using this method for a meat though to quick fake schwarma in the future.
Sesame Cauliflower Buns with Crispy Brussels Sprouts and Srircha Mayo
So… I’mma tell you out the gate, I fucked this one up. I put the bun filling sauce on the brussels sprouts by accident and after that, there was no going back. So we put both sauces in the pan, and did the sprouts and filling as big pile of stuffing. This means we lost the contrast and texture differences in the dish so it was relatively one note, but it was still a good dinner and while I wasn’t super happy with it because I messed it up, shmoo and our guest both thought it was pretty tasty and it was very filling as well. We’ll be on the look out for this one so we can order it again and make it correctly.