DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I think I know now why they call the restaurant “Millennium:” that’s how long it takes to follow their recipes.

On Saturday I made a page from the Artful Vegan cookbook. The actual 47-word title for the dish isn’t handy; something like “Black Quinoa Cakes with Calypso Bean Confit, Squash Curry, Braised Collard Greens, and Mango-Habanero Sauce”. It’s a single entree with five separate sub-recipes (nearly all of which call for onions).

Save yourself the time of shopping for black quinoa. You could buy regular yellow quinoa and color each individual grain with a black Sharpie in less time than you’ll spend not finding a source for black quinoa, which as far as I can tell has to be mail-ordered from Peru.

The recipe contains a few other buried challenges, like smoking onions. I own no smoker. I had to settle for grilling the onions, and adding a half-teaspoon of liquid smoke extract to the pot when nobody was looking.

I realized that having five separate procedures to follow is about one unit of recipe complexity more than I can comfortable handle. Three things at a time, I can manage, but with four or five I need to start considering serving separate courses. I think the quinoa cake would have been nice a la carte, maybe with a side of organic ketchup, for example.

Anyway, the result, when it finally hit the table, was impressive: a layer of black beans with smoked onions, topped with braised collard greens sauteed with more onions, topped with a yellow quinoa cake (which contains onions), topped with Indian squash curry that’s mostly onions, topped with habanero-mango sauce and toasted pistachios and cilantro.

The recipe claims to serve six. You have to remember that this is “California cuisine,” which I usually translate for out-of-state visitors as “Big plate, small food.” Four of us polished the full recipe and half a loaf of spelt sourdough besides.