Needs work: Black Bean Cakes and Jicama Salad
I feel bad for leaving my sick husband high and dry for dinner two nights in a row. I just haven't had the appetite for dinner. I'm also pretty sick of the usual fare, and making or ordering pizza every time I feel lazy is getting old. So tonight I decided to try some new things. I made a black bean cake from a recipe we saw on NY1 last weekend. I also experimented with jicama, which I've had in Malaysian restaurants, but never at home.
Both dishes kind of missed the mark tonight. I added corn and some seasonings to the black bean cakes, but the consistency was a bit more mushy than I expected. Another problem is that they were fried in canola oil, which makes the whole kitchen-living-dining area smell wicked. As the cakes barely held together in the oil, I worried we'd be sticking to the jicama-beet-carrot salad for sustenance. But I was wrong. The salad had a mustard, lemon, rice vinegar dressing that just doesn't go well with jicama, and the pre-cooked packaged beets I used were not crunchy enough to match the other components. The bean cakes were actually pretty good with the cilantro-sour cream. This was not a dinner for the books today, but the concepts are worth a try-try again some other day.
Recipes:
Black Bean Cake with Cilantro Sour Cream
Jicama Carrot Beet Salad
The husband's version with Frank's hot sauce - he thought these cakes tasted like my enchiladas "deconstructed" (which I guess is a good thing?)
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