One Pot, Pan, Planet

May 29-June 8, 2022

   

Michael's been relaying good reviews of Anna Jones' recipes to me for a few years, so for his most recent birthday I gave him a copy of her latest cookbook: One Pot, Pan, Planet. Since it's a relatively new release, we're going to show you the first five recipes we've made from it, hold off on reproducing the recipes themselves, and encourage you to buy the book if it appeals to you.

As you might guess from the title, the theme here is simple and environmentally-friendly cooking. It's all vegetarian, with vegan adaptations on almost everything. There's extensive text regarding Jones' philosophy of food, including (British) seasonality, centring vegetables, and reducing food waste and environmental impact. She makes an effort not to be overly preachy or elitist, and I'm ambivalent about whether she succeeds. 

   

That said, we're in it for the weeknight-friendly veg*n cooking inspiration, and there's plenty of it here. I invited Michael to pick a meal from the book that I would prepare as part of the gift. For dinner, he chose the saag aloo shepherd's pie (pictured top), which Jones admits is slower work than many of the recipes. The filling is a can each of beans and tomatoes with the full spice rack of Indian aromatics: turmeric, chilli, garam masala and cumin seeds. On top is a loosely mashed turmeric-yellow mixture of cauliflower, potatoes and spinach. It took two big saucepans, two baking trays and just short of two hours to make and we were satisfied with the results. This recipe includes ghee, but would be vegan with a coconut oil substitution.

For dessert, Michael requested the cherry and smoked salt clafoutis (pictured above). This was a one-bowl-plus-one-baking-dish affair that's heavy on the eggs and doesn't include a vegan option. The clafoutis was extremely simple to put together - a layer of jarred sour cherries covered in a layer of what looked like pancake batter, sprinkled with fancy salt and chunky sugar crystals. It baked in the still-hot oven while we ate our shepherd's pie. The batter set into something more like a custard, and it reminded me of this raspberry custard cake I made a year ago (and scored bonus points for not requiring egg separation or electric beating).

   

I had less success with the chocolate, olive oil and rosemary cake a week later. The skewer test failed me, and I had raw batter oozing out from the centre when I first attempted to cut some for afternoon tea! A second bake put that right but I still wasn't thrilled with the results. The recipe didn't call for sifting, and I ended up with little seams of bicarb soda flavour through the cake. That's easily solved on a second attempt. Less solvable is the effect of the olive oil, which seemed to pool up in the base of the cake. The vegan option on this cake uses sparkling water in place of eggs and dairy milk and I can't imagine the additional changes this would make to the texture. I've got such a strong selection of cake recipes at the ready (both vegan and non-) that I can't see myself revisiting this one.

   

The cake failure was followed up with our favourite One recipe so far: home-made flatbreads piled with a warmly spiced pumpkin mixture, pistachios, feta, pomegranate seeds and coriander leaves. This recipe took one bowl, one saucepan, one frypan and two people - mainly because the flatbread rolling and frying was a bit finicky. As you can see above, the result is a party on a plate and we'd love to make this again to share with friends for a weekend lunch.

   

Our final recipe trial thus far has been the carrot soup with rosemary and tahini. It's one pot, one frypan and one stick blender in the making, and vegan as-is. The soup is brightly coloured and flavoured with oranges as well as carrots. Michael took care to dry the canned chickpeas and master the crunchy, salty garnish, which is really what lifts the meal beyond one flavour note.

As you might have noticed, the One Pot, Pan promise of this cookbook doesn't quite deliver. Still, we're content to take on the level of effort and dishwashing actually required here. I'll likely pause on the dessert section a while, but I anticipate that we'll be exploring plenty more of the main meals in One Pot, Pan, Planet this winter.