In my last Buckwheat Three Ways post, I spent a fair portion of my blog kvetching about all the things I didn’t like about this recipe. Now, as I said before, I’m not dissing the recipe itself – it’s a great recipe, it really is – but it’s just not my taste. Making this recipe and trying to like it would be the same as dressing in leopard print and stirrup leggings every day – some people would probably be thrilled to do so, but I can’t say I’d ever be one of them. So, in the spirit of adventure and experimentation, I set about making up my own buckwheat casserole recipe.
This endeavor was fairly nerve-wracking at the start, more than I really expected it to be, which was sheer foolishness on my part. For all that I’m a cooking rule breaker, I’ve never sat down and tried to make up something all on my own. Yet I honestly thought it wouldn’t be that tough of a job. Ha, yeah right, and I could be a professional lion tamer ‘cause I’m really good with house cats. Truth of the matter is, creating a recipe of your own out of thin air, using nothing as your base, is a huge challenge. After several purely mental attempts to come up with my very own buckwheat casserole recipe felt flat (and that’s being generous), I decided that massive adaptations to the original Buckwheat and Cottage Cheese Casserole recipe by Lorna Sass would be just as good.
Veggies ready for choppingI decided to start with the most basic element of this dish – the whole concept of a casserole. A quick search online confirmed one of my initial reactions to the base recipe, which was that feeling that something (more things!) was missing. A casserole usually consists of pieces of meat or fish, various chopped vegetables, and some sort of starch (potato, pasta, or flour) that acts as a binder. Well I like meat, I love veggies, and the buckwheat is certainly the starchy binder, so all I really needed to do was add in vegetables and maybe some kind of meat and I’d have a real honest to goodness casserole. I kept several of the original ingredients and followed most if not all of the instructions, but just knowing that what I thought might be missing actually was missing made me feel tons better.
To read the rest of this story please go to: Whole Grains Council/Oldways Preservation Trust