Exploring Bon Appétit: 3 Times a charm

I like to try new magazine subscriptions so I recently subscribed to bon appétit. I like the big shiny pictures and the variety of recipes in each issue. I go through each one and earmark pages with recipes I want to try. So far I've gotten 3 issues and have tried a recipe from each one. Unfortunately, my first 2 attempts were not good. But I kept trying and the 3rd recipe, from February's green issue, worked fine. Here's the scoop.

First, since I'm on a quest to expand my butternut squash horizons, I thought I'd make the butternut squash latkes with sage pine-nut yogurt sauce. First I made the sauce--using thick Greek yogurt as recommended. Here are the pine nuts, fresh sage and butter browning together.



Here's the mixed sauce. It was tasty! After licking off the spoon I put it in the fridge and started on the latkes.



Here is where disaster struck. Have you ever tried to fry apple sauce? It's easy to put in the pan, but very very hard to flip over. The consistency of the batter was really loose and squash-y. The concoction seemed to have very little binder so each latke basically fell apart. I took photos but will spare the gory details. I tried messing with the recipe to get it to stick together--even tried adding some pancake mix. But I just couldn't flip these flipping things over. So they sat in their own puddles of squash and burned. (The recipe seemed good in other respects--not too sweet, and I liked the slight rich undertone provided by a little ground cumin.) Here's my plate--I took the worst bits for myself. The mush at the back of the plate is my first batch that I just squished all together and ate like puree.



My next recipe was a cardamom yogurt chicken curry. It was designed to go with a red pepper shallot dish but I couldn't afford both so I just picked the chicken. This recipe was better--I slow cooked it using chicken legs and it came out tender and flavorful. But I felt there were just too many different spices for my taste. This is more personal preference though. I just felt all the spices were starting to cancel each other out. No photo of this one--it looked like a mass of red curry.

My third recipe was hummus. I like it! I usually make hummus "by ear." I throw the ingredients into the food processor in random amounts and taste until it's hummus-like. It was a change to have actual directions. I didn't have a jalapeno to add but the single garlic clove does give it a little bite. Also, I am fanatical about boiling my dried beans or peas with kelp, so I threw in the cooked kelp with the rest of the ingredients and got a nice confetti look. (Kelp has no taste to me. It just helps soften beans and make them more digestible. It also falls apart when cooked, so doesn't change a dish's texture, in my opinion.)