Recipe and Dirt Candy Sneak Peek: Amanda Cohen’s Spinach Soup with Smoked Corn Dumplings and Lemon Confit

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Amanda Cohen's Dirt Candy
Amanda Cohen’s Dirt Candy (The original image is no longer available, please contact KCRW if you need access to the original image.)

Today on Good Food, Chef Amanda Cohen of Dirt Candy talks about the challenge of cooking vegetables versus meat. She explains that unlike meat, vegetables are mostly water and often uniform in structure. To achieve the same satisfaction we get from the Maillard reaction when cooking a steak, she suggests smoking your veggies.

Invest in two pans (one perforated and one not) and some wood chips. These three components will allow you to smoke vegetables, herbs and nuts. (Imagine smoked hazelnuts in a salad or a smoked basil pesto!) Smoking vegetables provides an unexpected flavor that many diners often associate with meat. But beware, in her book Cohen cautions diners: Smoking plant based foods may cause delicious tastiness, extreme flavor, and may make your entire house smell edible.

DirtCandy_smoking3

As you can see, Cohen’s Dirt Candy cookbook is part graphic novel, part instruction manual and part recipes. Now that you are ready to get more texture and excitement into your veggies, try this recipe for Spinach Soup with Smoked Corn Dumplings and Lemon Confit and scroll down for more Ryan Dunlavey illustrated graphics below.