Monday June 3 Love Cakes with Pico de Gallo, Jalapeno-Cilantro Corn Muffins and Salad Rating; 4.25

So I was getting desperate trying to think of things to do with a few of the CSA items. Not that I’m complaining about the abundance, I just needed to get creative. One of the things that required some inventive thinking was the enormous bunch of cilantro, largely because I really don’t like it. Seth loves it, which is great, but this was a HUGE bunch. He made a big batch of his fresh pico de gallo and had a nice snack the other day and there was a little left over, so we decided to use that up with dinner. But what to do with the rest of the cilantro? After some looking around I decided to make a meal based around black beans and work from there. Enter the Love Cakes. If you’re not from this area (or one of the cities they’ve opened franchises in) Love Cakes are tasty little black bean cakes from the Flying Biscuit restaurants. The original Flying Biscuit is about 2 miles from us and on weekends there’s a line out the door with a 30 minute wait for breakfast. Several years ago they were franchised and now can be found around the Atlanta area and in several other cities. The food is funky, Southern and yummy. They only have a couple of vegan options on the menu, but they’re good – just don’t eat the biscuits, those aren’t vegan. Anyway, back to the love cakes. I’ve never actually ordered them, but Seth has and he really likes them. They come with tomatillo salsa, sour cream, and for some reason, feta. Ick – but you know, just get them without the breast milk products and you’ll be fine. Flying Biscuit does a thing where they share some of their recipes and I noticed once a long time ago, that the Love Cakes were on there. Sadly, they were gone when I went looking for them, but someone else had posted the recipe on her blog, so here ya go (again, just leave off the gross stuff).  They’re crazy easy to make – I made a half batch and we had about 3 left over (they’re pretty small). I topped mine with some of the leftover cashew-horseradish sour cream from the other day. Seth used up the last of his salsa. But this did not solve my cilantro problem. So, since we were having a vaguely Southwestern entrée, I made some corn muffins (1000 Vegan Recipes) and doctored them up with fresh jalapeno and chopped cilantro. I was afraid to overdo both, but really could’ve added more of each. They were really good and went very well with the Love Cakes. Seth made a HUGE salad for us from some of the CSA lettuce (the heads were really big this time) and I whipped up a quick batch of Buttermilk Ranch from Cookin’ Crunk. Yummers.