Foodie, Formerly Fat

I have a cookbook called The Whole Foods Market Cookbook. I love it. But I rarely cook from it. When I examine this I have to admit that as much as I adore my cookbooks, and would fight to the death to keep them, I rarely cook from them. I have many of the requisite ones, like Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I also have some tomes like Larousse Gastronomique, and The Silver Spoon. I also have fabulous new ones like Deliciously Organic by Carrie Vitt and I’m salivating over getting Super Natural Every Day by Heidi Swanson. But in the end… I’m too much of a jerk to stick to recipes and tend to start improvising. So, I use my cookbooks as points for inspiration.

With a desire for inspiration I started thumbing through The Whole Foods Market Cookbook the other day. I had forgotten just how utterly spectacular it is with it’s ‘vegetarian’ and ‘vegan’ labels, it’s cooking time guides for things like amaranth and teff, and it’s recipes for everything from a white bean and kale gratin, to jerk chicken, to sangria. Everything in it seems to sing “summer” to me and this time of year I can’t resist it’s siren song.

I tend to just let the book fall open to a random page and then use that as a jumping off point for meandering aimlessly through the book. But this time I got only two pages from the random page it had opened to before I was making my grocery list. Hot dog, this looked good!

Because it’s me, I’ve made some minor alterations but for the most part I followed their recommendations. They have great little sections on the recipe pages that offer alternatives and I liked some of the alternatives here enough to run with them and then some. I adjusted some of the quantities of things to suit what I know my tastes are, so I encourage you to do the same.

In the end this dish was extremely easy and fast to prepare. The veggies and sauce cooked up while the orzo was cooking and then the scallops cook in 4 minutes total. It was 25 minutes start to finish and the meal felt special and decadent. Not too shabby for any night of the week.