I was very pleased with the dishes I tried in January for Part One of my BOSH! review, and happily February has been an equally delicious month! Without further ado, here’s what we made this month (with thanks to Dr HH for doing the bulk of the cooking this time around).

Big Eats

The pasta caponata was a simple but flavoursome dish, with some delicious roasted aubergine chunks and various tasty elements (capers, olives, pine nuts). It’s always nice to have a slightly fancier pasta dish to throw together for emergencies, and I wholeheartedly approve of this one!

Showpieces

I was a bit taken aback to see a chilli recipe listed in the Showpieces section, even if it was named ultimate chilli. I maintain that it has no place in that section – it was a solid chilli recipe, but pretty standard. Hyping it up by putting it in this section was not a great move.

The big BOSH! burger also suffered from being placed in the wrong section. It was a decent burger primarily made of sweet potato, brown rice, and kidney beans, but it wasn’t a particularly mind-blowing burger. It was tasty, but I won’t be going out of my way to try this recipe again.

The rich and creamy lasagne is more what I was expecting to find in this section. There are few things I love more these days than spending a few hours labouring over a lasagne of a weekend, and this one was just as much fun to eat. The chunks of butternut squash and aubergine were delicious, and I enjoyed the bechamel too. I’d sooner remake the pesto lasagne recipe from this book (see last month’s post), because it’s hard to argue against the exciting addition of pesto.

Greens & BOSH! Bowls

This was delicious! It’s the satay sweet potato BOSH! bowl, and it was a masterpiece: roasted sweet potato and broccoli, quinoa, fresh avo, a dollop of homemade hummus, and most importantly a sensational dressing. I like bowls (except for all the washing up they entail), but their success really hinges on the dressing. I would drink this one straight from the blender if Dr HH would let me! This was a sublime dish of food.

Small Plates & Sharers

I’m not sure we’ve ever had homemade cauliflower buffalo wings more tender than these ones: they were delicious. However, we encountered that classic issue that the coating went quite soggy due to the hot sauce, so we’d go back to our usual technique of serving the sauce on the side. The ranch dressing was nice and cool as well, though still not our favourite (that honour still goes to a creamy blue cheese dip).

We baked rather than fried the popcorn falafel, and I’m not sure this was the best plan – they turned out quite dry. They were still tasty though, and there were plenty of them!

We had these for packed lunches with both the classic hummus and the olive tapenade hummus. I was worried about the latter being a bit too strongly flavoured (and too heavy on the parsley), but actually it was delicious. We enjoyed all four hummus recipes we tried from this book.

The garlic and herb cashew cheese was not a total success – we added a bit too much water and ended up with a sloppier cheese that could be spread but not sliced. It was still really creamy and tasty though, and cheese-making is definitely an area where I want to experiment more.

Desserts

These gooey PBJ brownies are amongst the best brownies I’ve ever eaten, never mind personally baked. The texture was perfect: so dense and gooey. And I don’t even like jam, and I thought the raspberry swirls were an absolute delight. I’m planning on making these again with speculoos spread soon.

Breakfast

When I order a full English breakfast in any eatery I always judge it on whether or not the beans are homemade. There’s nothing like some excitingly-flavoured beans! This may have been our first time making our own, and I was definitely a fan. The smoky BBQ beans on toast had loads of flavour (though Dr HH thought they could have been a bit smokier), and were nice and easy to make.

The chocolate granola was also a hit. It was quite a simple granola, with plenty of good stuff in it: coconut, chocolate, and a squillion different kinds of nuts. Usually I don’t eat granola for breakfast in February as I need nice warm porridge, but it’s been so Spring-like that I was happy to try this instead.

We also sprinkled some of the granola on top of the choconana protein shake, which was nice but generally an unremarkable shake. Nice, but not groundbreaking.

All in all, I’m a big fan of this book and could probably get another month out of it if I were so inclined. There are a lot of recipes, most of them very tempting, and I enjoyed everything I made. I stand by the grievance I mentioned last time, that the recipes aren’t that nicely set out and can be a little confusing to follow, but overall it’s still worth the effort to muddle through it and produce something delicious.

If you’re planning to delve into this book, I’d recommend starting with the gooey PBJ brownies, the satay sweet potato bowl, pesto lasagne, and both kinds of sushi rolls. And probably the chocolate fudge cake too! Have I tempted you to try BOSH!?