Yuca black bean cakes with sweet mango, mustard and habanero sauce

I don’t only cook from Artful Vegan, honestly! It’s just that I had a few days off work so I was determined to get a couple of new dishes sorted out. I’ve been having a sort of competition with my on-line friend Gill to see who can cook most recipes from these books. Since she’s not even vegan I felt I ought to be winning this one hands down, but she’s giving it a good shot! (I win the competition for meeting Eric Tucker though; even though I turned into a brainless dribbling idiot when I bumped into him at his restaurant Millennium).

I picked this recipe out because I knew I had some frozen yuca taking up space in my freezer, but when I came to cook it I wasn’t sure the frozen would work so I switched to the suggestion of sweet potato instead.

It’s really quite a simple dish (it’s from the appetiser section but as usual I just served a larger portion as a main course just for me). There are quite a few dishes in these books that are simpler than others, so if you’ve been neglecting these books because you think all the recipes are too time consuming, do get them out again and have another look.

I made the roasted tomato salsa first – I’ve never made salsa with roasted tomatoes before and I will definitely do it that way again. Then I made the habanero and mango sauce, and finally the yuca-black bean cakes. I didn’t expect the cakes to hold together but they did.

This wasn’t my favourite dish from these books but it was still very nice. I think the main problem was the sauce. Sometimes US ingredients differ from ours and that may have been the case here, but the mustard was far too overpowering. Looking at the recipe again I wish it had stated a weight for the mango because I’m sure that Californian mangoes must be a lot bigger and tastier than ours. If I was making this again I’d probably double the mango in it.

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