This is not slop in the traditional sense of the word. In fact, it is not slop at all. It was a real honest-to-god recipe from Cucina Italiana. Frankly, the components didn’t appeal to me but I’m open to most things, except for anchovies and smoked salmon, certain offal and sardines. This was vegetarian and I feel I need more of that in my life so I went and bought savoy cabbage, swiss cheese and fennel. I had lentils, cream cheese (shoulda been mascarpone but that costs like $5 and I wasn’t willing to part with that just for the sake of experimentation, on the other hand apparently I’ll spend 100 times that at a restaurant rather than run screaming out in horror), coriander, lemon and butter.
Boil the cabbage and fennel, respectively. Boil the lentils with bay leaves and thyme until soft and process with the cream cheese and lemon zest. This recipe gets more foolish sounding with every ingredient. Then you layer it all, cabbage, fennel, lentil-cheese stuff, swiss cheese and repeat. Then bake it for 50 minutes. Frankly that’s a long time for something in which all the components are already cooked, but hey, it’s a recipe from a magazine. What do I know.
The final product looked lovely and the savoy cabbage and fennel were not over powering. In fact, the most noticeable thing was the grittiness of the lentils. It wasn’t bad. I ate it. But it was slop. Pure and simple.
