I like the cookbook One-Dish Vegetarian by Maria Robbins, but I have a running objection to the relative blandness of many of the recipes. It's not vegan, that's for sure (cheese everywhere) and the author confesses she's not actually a vegetarian, but I'll leave the consideration of these points to my V-friends to ponder. That said, I've had decent luck using recipes in this book as a departure point.
In the particular section I was reading last week, I was taken with her praise of barley. And it's true, barley is underrated - it holds its own in such mixes a lot better than rice, it cooks up more easily than brown rice or a lot of beans, and it holds a coat. It's possible to overcook it and get a glutinous mass, but it's relatively hard in my experience. So I thought: let's do something with barley this week.
I started this recipe based on her "Barley with Spinach and Peas" on p. 114, a recipe I've made before and said, yeah, OK, but something's missing. This time I made it into a casserole: I monkeyed with the ingredient quantities, added mushrooms, omitted the salt, doubled the parmiggiano, and added an egg and some milk as a holding agent. Verdict: excellent. Here's the modified version of the recipe:
EVO to coat the bottom of a dutch oven
1 largish onion, diced finely
2 very large carrots or moral equivalent, diced (note I used yellow carrots tonight, see photo above)
6 small celery ribs (or, maybe, 2 huge ones), diced finely
4 cups vegetable broth
1 1/2 cups pearl barley
16 ounces of frozen chopped spinach, thawed, or equivalent fresh blanched (maybe a pound and a half?); Mika thinks chard would be an acceptable substitute here, but I'm not so sure
1 cup frozen peas (fresh if you can get them would be excellent here, they'd have to be steamed and immersed in cold water before adding in the step below)
1 pound crimini mushrooms, stemmed, and sliced in half and then in rounds
2 tablespoons butter
1 egg
1 tablespoon milk
1 cup grated parmiggiano
Get out the Dutch oven, heat it a bit, add the EVO, let it heat, and then add over medium heat the onion, carrots, and celery. Woosh around for about five minutes, until everything is just a bit soft.
Add the vegetable broth and bring to a boil. Add the barley, reduce heat to a hard simmer for 5 minutes, then reduce to a light simmer and cook for 20 minutes. Stir once or twice while simmering.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
Stir in the peas and spinach, cover, and cook on low for another 10 minutes, until the liquid is almost all gone -- just a bit on the bottom. During this stage, saute the mushrooms separately in a tablespoon of butter until they're cooked but still firm. Set aside. Then beat the egg with the milk in a separate bowl.
Mix in the mushrooms, then the egg-milk mixture, the second tablespoon of butter, and then the cheese. Put the dutch oven, covered, into the oven and cook for 15 minutes. Remove the cover and cook 5-10 more minutes. The casserole will be bubbly, not crusty, but the bubbling should be quite thick.
This was great as-is, and also was served nicely with a little Louisiana-style red hot sauce.