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Summer Pasta Salad (Alissa Noel Grey)

5-Ingredient Cookbook: 3/50

Flavor: 4/5 Time: 2.5/5 Cost: 3/5

Out of all the recipes I've tried from Alissa Noel Grey's 5 Ingredient Cookbook, the Summer Pasta Salad is my favorite so far. Despite being a red-blooded American, I actually have never used plain mayonnaise as a sauce for, well, anything before, so I admit I had some hesitation around this recipe for that reason. But I gave it a try, and it was surprisingly pleasant.

I'm used to pasta salads made with vinaigrette or Italian dressing, so having a creamy pasta salad was a treat in both texture and flavor. It is absolutely essential to use good quality (aka, the one that you think tastes the best) mayo here, because that flavor coats everything and you get that flavor in every bite, so it's important that you use a brand (or make your own!) that suits your preferences. I reserved some pasta water and used that to melt the mayo and make for a richer sauce that clung to the noodles divinely, and I definitely recommend that step!

The ham provides a nice texture to an otherwise soft pasta dish. The gherkins (or as we more frequently say in the U.S., pickles) work similarly, adding a nice crunch. I assumed the author intended us to use sweet pickles (which I am a huge fan of!) but we ended up with baby dill pickles. This still tasted great--I'm a huge fan of dill--and the saltiness from the pickle brine and dill flavor add some complexity.

My fiancé was a dear and made a batch of eggs for us, knowing I needed some for this recipe. However, my guy tends to prepare hard-boiled eggs on the soft-boiled side. I have no objection to this--I love the creamy, runny yolk--but it was certainly messy to chop up the eggs for this salad! Most of the yolks sadly ended up on the cutting board. If you boil your eggs for harder yolks, you may enjoy that additional firmness from them, as well as the nice yellow color. Even though my yolks didn't quite make it to the salad bowl, the whites were included were a nice touch.

A common theme I'm seeing with Alissa Noel Grey's cookbook is that it is... I'm sorry, it's just so bland. I knew this was likely with this recipe, so I took liberty to include extra pickles as well as some fresh rosemary sprigs, which really boosted the flavor. Once the recipe was chilled, it was actually so delicious. It's certainly not the most complex flavor profile one would ever eat, but it was tasty, and that's what matters. The rosemary added a fresh herbaceousness, and the creaminess from the mayo and eggs was delightful. I liked the crunch of the pickles and their salt/dill contribution, and who can resist a chunk of ham? This recipe is simple, but the flavor is not compromised. It has a broad appeal that I think would work for many palates. Just in case you don't believe me, I shared bowls of this with my two-year-old, and he loved it!

This pasta salad is also flexible in the sense that you can adjust the ingredients (the ham can be swapped for seafood or tofu depending on your dietary needs and what you have on hand, and it takes well to herbs or other seasonings). It's appropriate for potlucks, picnics, as a side dish or a main. I would recommend this recipe for gatherings, because I got about 6 portions out of it.

This recipe was fairly cost effective, totaling about $2.88 for the whole shebang, which is generously portioned. It is a bit of a time commitment, though--definitely not something you can whip up fast. You're looking at at least 7 minutes of cook time on the eggs, plus shocking, peeling, and chopping them; cooking and chopping the ham, slicing the pickles, cooking, draining, and shocking the pasta, combining everything, then chilling it in the fridge for half an hour--not counting the time it takes for the waters to boil and the pan(s) to get hot. It's definitely not a one-pot meal, either, despite everything coming together in one bowl. So it's not exactly friendly on your sink or dishwasher.

But the summer pasta salad does encapsulate the down-home, Midwestern flavor of summertime gatherings. It provides a good flavor while remaining simple enough to modify based on one's own preferences and creativity (you can easily make this fancier or more flavorful, if need be).

Not the best thing I ever ate, but tasted good and would probably make again. 8/10 B+

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Chicken* and Broccoli Salad (Alissa Noel Grey)

5 Ingredient Cookbook: 2/50

Flavor: 2/5 Time: 5/5 Cost: 2/5

This is a dish I had decent hopes for. But sadly, it just didn't hit the mark.

*Part of this blogging journey is to help me flex my creativity and make sensible substitutes with whatever I have on hand. The recipe called for diced chicken breast, but we had some leftover uncooked pork that had been pounded out very thin for schnitzel. I used one of those for the protein in place of chicken. That's why it looks so... like that in the photo.

I made some other small adjustments to the recipe, including using a roma tomato instead of cherry tomatoes, boiling the broccoli instead of searing it, and including salt and pepper. I don't know if the Mediterranean Diet influence of this book prohibits the use of seasonings, but I promise you, a little salt and pepper go a looong way.

Having said that, I don't recommend these adjustments: the roma tomato was watery (instead of the fresh snap of a nice cherry tomato) and made the whole dish taste odd after a minute. That mixed with the boiled broccoli produced a kind of mild sock drawer flavor that was needless to say, unpalatable. The pork was good despite looking sad and pathetic. The S + P and olive oil does wonders for a humble cut of meat. And while the texture of the broccoli was to my liking, the whole thing just didn't come together.

I imagine if I used fresh broccoli that had been seared in the oil, as the recipe recommended, that would add a nice crispiness to the veg and add some textural contrast. Ditto for the cherry tomatoes, which would've had a nice firmness and sweeter flavor. There wasn't much of a difference for the pork in place of chicken breast, though, so at least there's that.

The moral of the story is, while convenience is great, not all swaps are gonna be successes. I couldn't justify spending $7 on cherry tomatoes right now, when a simple roma was 55 cents, but I ate (ha!) the difference in flavor. I also used frozen broccoli, which is a staple in my house, but I should've gave it more time to drain (damn cooking while hungry!) I also used jarred pesto, which was more like a basil-scented alfredo sauce, very thin and mild. I love to make pesto homemade, but since the store was out of basil, jarred did just fine. It didn't add much either way.

So it feels bad to penalize a recipe that has decent bones because of the rough economy and using what I have on hand, but then again, I live by the wise words of Chopped alum Madison Cowan: "A tin of vienna sausages is a fine ingredient, you know what I mean?" At the end of the day, it's what's on the plate; if I had to eat this the way it was made again, I'd pass. But I would try it again using homemade pesto and cherry tomatoes. And chicken lmao.

Speaking of using what we have on hand, the recipe only called for a tablespoon or 2 of the pesto, so I made a box of rotini and threw the rest of the jar in there. Not bad, but not as good as homemade, obvi. Eating this broccoli salad made me think the whole concoction might actually work better as a topping for the pasta than on its own.

(Psst, check your GI constitution before you consider making a meal out of something that is 90% broccoli.)

Searing the porkchop only took a couple minutes since it was so thin. Boiling the water for broccoli then letting it cook through took the longest (around 10 minutes). Seasoning the pork, chopping up a tomato, opening a jar, and throwing it all into a bowl went faster than writing this sentence. So it is a pretty easy dish that certainly doesn't take long. (The recipe called for cooked chicken breast. If you get one of those precooked packages and pop that in the microwave, and sear or air fry the broccoli and you could really save time if you're in a crunch).

This dish is super cost effective, also. My guy got a pack of porkchops on sale for $7, making the cost for 1 about $1.40. This is 64% of the food cost in this dish, so definitely use whatever protein is on hand for added cost-effectiveness. Even so, the grand total for 1 portion adds up to about $2.19. Not bad, but definitely more than I'd want to pay for what I got to be honest.

Bland, mid, gave me a stomachache. 3/10; D+ Would not recommend.

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Caprese Salad (Alissa Noel Grey)

5 Ingredient Cookbook: 1/50

Flavor: 3.5/5 Time: 5/5 Cost: 5/5

Full disclosure: I've never actually had a Caprese salad before. I know, I know, revoke my Mediterranean heritage now. It just always seemed so... boring. Same-y. Why have one when you could have, say, a Caesar salad?

Or something with meat?

But there was nothing holding me back from trying for the sake of this blogging project. And hey, any excuse to try something new is good enough for me.

Now, my version did make some modifications compared to the original. First, I hate mozzarella (another strike to my culture!) So I substituted Swiss cheese, which has an equally mild flavor and, in my opinion, superior texture. My grocer was also out of basil (heartbreaking, because this is one of my favorite herbs). So I took a risk a swapped it out for mint. Which isn't as crazy as it sounds! Mint and basil both belong to the mint family of herbs (lamiaceae). Also, this recipe didn't call for salt, but it felt wrong to omit it, so I included a generous pinch. And I promise you, a salted tomato is an oddly unique pleasure.

And despite the modifications, despite the lack of meat, despite the absence of anything warm (there's something terribly sad about a dinner that isn't hot), it was actually pretty good! The olive oil and the salt worked together to bring out the savoriness of the tomato, the mint took on a flavor very similar to basil in this preparation, and the firmness of the cheese added a nice textural contrast to the softer tomato. When you got a bite with everything in it, it was actually kinda splendid: much more complex than I initially thought, with the savoriness of the cheese and oil, the brightness from the tomato and vinegar, and the unexpected pop of mint. There was nothing sweet about the mint here. I encourage using it in savory preparations! And despite it being a cold dish, it was light and refreshing. Although, it's likely more satisfying as an accompaniment or an appetizer than a meal itself (unless you really bulk it up--I trimmed down the recipe to be enough for 1 person, when it could originally feed six!)

In terms of nutrition, this caprese salad is definitely light. After crunching the numbers, it came out to 273 calories--about half of what one might expect for a full meal (lending credence to the idea that's more of a starter than a main course). This version is also higher in fat (26g) and lower in carbs (4g) with 6g of protein. I'm not sure how well that measures up for folks practicing keto, but I'm sure with some tweaking it could hit the mark.

This recipe is also extremely cost-effective: It cost me less than $10 ($8.83, to be exact) to get everything from the store (which was just about everything the recipe required, except for olive oil and salt, which I had on hand). But obviously, I didn't use the ingredients in their entirety to make one portion of caprese. For this plate, the grand total came out to a whopping 67 cents!

Compared to the $10 I accidentally spent on grapes, that's an absolute steal. Especially in this economy, when everything is just outrageously expensive. And you know what? The flavor was really good too, for it costing a sprinkle more than half a dollar. Plus it was reasonably nutritious also: there was a pleasing amount of B vitamins in the mix (including 11% of the recommended daily value of B12) and 10% RDV of vitamin A.

So basically I've been sleeping on the caprese salad. Would make + eat again. 8/10; B+

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And so it begins...

I'm very excited to make my first post! I'll use this post as a quick reference with links that I'll progressively add as time goes on and new cookbooks are undertaken.

For now, there was one...

The 5 Ingredient Cookbook by Alissa Noel Grey!

I'm very methodical; I look to do things in numerical/alphabetical order. So while this likely isn't a cookbook you've heard of (I certainly haven't), trying something new is part of the fun!

While not being hard and fast, the intro to this cookbook professes to be inspired by the Mediterranean Diet. This is a manner of eating that minimizes red meats and emphasizes fresh fruit, veg, olive oil, and seafood.

How will it go? Let's see!