Category Archives: salad

Coleslaw with daikon & radishes and creamy dill-almond dressing

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Daikon, radish, dill colesalw

We got some daikon from our CSA. Of course, daikon always reminds me of the giant radish spirit in Spirited Away. The night we ate this coleslaw, I lay awake for a while thinking about the film, which I love, obviously – as I’ve said a million times, I love the idea of spirits all around us – spirits of polluted rivers and giant radishes, spirits of animals, food and people. It all begins with a meal. On their journey to a new home, Chihiro and her family take a wrong turn. They stop for a meal in a strange place, and her parents eat with ridiculous greed. They eat like pigs, and as a result, they’re turned into pigs. So Chihiro is stuck on an island of spirits. She’s remarkably brave, and she faces all sorts of strangeness with pluck and sass. She takes a job in the boiler room of a bathhouse, and works her way up to the baths themselves, where she meets strange spirits of every shape. Throughout the film, food has the power to comfort or transform. It becomes a part of each creature’s identity and it forms part of the judgement leveled upon them. Chihiro’s friend Haku offers her a small berry to eat when she’s becoming transparent, and this makes her more solid. When the spirits complain of her foreign smell, Haku says that once she’s eaten their food for a few days she’ll smell like everyone else. And he offers her rice to eat to build her strength after an ordeal. At the other extreme, we have a polluted river spirit, made ill by all of the junk and dirt he’s swallowed, and No Face, who eats everyone in his path and becomes so huge that only Chihiro’s magic emetic dumpling will save him. What and how people and spirits eat becomes as much a part of who they are as their name, and when they forget their name they forget their history. It’s such a strange and wonderful film!

I like daikon raw, so I decided to combine it with cabbages and radishes, also from the farm, and to toss them all in a creamy (vegan) almond dill and caper dressing. I liked it a lot! It’s a nice combination of sweet, sharp and savory. Isaac liked it, too.

Here’s Bob Dylan with Spirit on the Water

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Spicy sweet roasted radish and turnip relish

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Radish and turnip relish

Attention! From henceforth, The Ordinary will be called The Clio Chronicles! All Clio all the time. News about Clio, pictures of Clio, songs about Clio. I’m joking, of course, but it’s amazing how quickly a little creature like this can take over your life. It’s wonderful how you can fall in love with a soft, warm, madly kissing, ludicrously cuddly little rat-tailed dog after so short an acquaintance. Last week we had a talk about whether or not to get the puppy, and there really aren’t very many rational reasons to get a dog. And yet I felt like I needed a dog, I needed this dog. And now that she’s here I can’t imagine not having her. At night we try to get her to sleep at the foot of the bed, but by morning she’s slithered up to my pillow, and she curls up there, whuffling in my ear and pressing her hot little body against me. We have dog dreams in our house again! Our Steenbeck died six months ago, and having a puppy doesn’t ease that pain. In some ways, having Clio around is completely bewildering. I don’t deal with change very well, even good change, particularly this time of year. This is a change that I very strongly advocated. I was a ridiculously bratty basket case all last week, because I wanted Clio so badly. But even this change makes me feel a little melancholy. She’s colored very differently than Steenbeck, but some of her expressions and reactions are so startlingly like Steenbeck, that I get lost in time…I all feel confused about the past in the future. It’s as though the strength of my aching loss has brought my memories alive.

Clio!


She’s a funny little girl, though. She’s a bright, scampering little rascal, with smart sea grey eyes and golden grey ears. She’s sassy like this relish! We got some little asian turnips in our CSA, as well as some more radishes. I’d roasted some radishes a few weeks ago, and enjoyed them, so I thought I’d try it again, this time with sweet carrots and sweet-sharp turnips. I coated them with a sweet sauce of ginger, cayenne and brown sugar (but you could use honey.) I thought the flavors were nice together – very different, but complementary. We ate it with savory tarts and croquettes. I liked it a lot mixed simply with basmati rice.

Here’s Soul Captives by Bob Marley. I had this song stuck in my head all night. Not the whole song, just the line, “time slips away without warning.”

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Roasted radish and beet salad

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Roasted radish and beet salad

Whenever I hear the word “radish” I think of the Simpsons. Other things that make me think of the Simpsons: oregano, doughnuts, convenience store hot dogs, very long sandwiches, skateboards, saxophones, tramampamolines, clouds in a blue sky, Mitt Romney, and, of course, 3 foot high blue hair. I used to love the Simpsons! I haven’t watched for about a decade, maybe. It all went downhill, for me, when they started having celebrity guests in most episodes. Luke Perry was the beginning of the end. But I’ve watched every episode from before that time about a billion times each, so I’m covered, Simpsons-wise. It’s funny how many situations in life call to mind a scene from the Simpsons. We rented the second season on DVD for the boys. They’ve seen some pretty dark shows – Star Wars, Harry Potter, Coraline – they all have some actually scary moments, and my boys are usually fine with it. But they found the Simpsons very unsettling. Despite the tall blue hair and the absurd humor, the Simpsons are very real. The problems they face each episode are very real human problems. And problems that my boys could relate to, and felt uneasy about – getting in trouble, problems with bullies, realizing that your parents don’t have the answer to every question. I think, despite being cartoons, and very cartoonish, the characters in this odd yellow family are well-rounded and subtle. I like when Lisa is little girlish, I like when she’s Simpsonish. I love Marge’s gentle nature – I need to be more like her!

When we got two big bunches of radishes from the CSA, I was tempted to carve them all into radish rosettes, like Marge’s impressive aliens. Instead, I decided to roast them with beets. Both pink, both root vegetables, but one is sharp and spicy and one is sweet and earthy. I thought they’d be perfect together! I’ve never eaten roasted radishes before, so I tried to keep the salad very simple so I could really taste them. I added almonds and fresh basil. I think it would be good with feta or goat cheese as well – maybe next time. We ate this with some fresh arugula from the farm, and it was very good indeed!

Here’s Mikey Dread with Roots and Culture
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Two summer salads with feta

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Arugula salad with apples, pecans and feta

We find ourselves in the delightful position of having too much to tell you about! I can’t keep up! I’ve also been talking too much lately. So, first of all, I apologize for posting several times in one day. Second of all, these are salads. Salads should be quick to make and pleasing to eat, and you shouldn’t waffle on about them for hours and hours. So I won’t! I’ll give you some recipes, and some good music, and set you on your way.

Chickpea, tomato, olive, feta salad

My boys loved both of these salads and fought over the bowl. The first is green and light, with arugula, romaine, pink lady apples, feta, and pecans. The second is a little heartier and quite savory. It’s got chickpeas, feta, kalamata olives, capers, pine nuts and fresh juicy tomatoes. We ate it with crispy eggplant rounds, as a nice meal.

And here’s a playlist featuring songs with horns. Horn-y songs. I love songs with horns! If anybody would like to suggest other songs with horns to add the list, I’m all ears!
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Chickpeas, tomatoes and pesto

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…and kohlrabi slaw with walnut and scallion dressing!

Chickpeas & pesto

We watched a remarkable movie the other night. Waste land, which is about Brazilian artist Vik Muniz’s lengthy project of making portraits of catadores, garbage pickers at the Jardim Gramacho landfill in Rio de Janeiro, was engrossing, disturbing, inspiring and hopeful, all at the same time. The landfill itself was massive and horrifying, and the jobs of the pickers – sorting through mountains of garbage to collect recyclables – seemed too awful to imagine. Yet they were cheerful, if not happy, and they’d created a supportive community for each other. Muniz makes a series of portraits of catadores in poses borrowed from famous paintings, and he uses the recyclable materials from the landfill as his medium. Waste Land reminded me of a film by Agnes Varda called The Gleaners and I. Varda, who is wonderfully curious and engaging, shoots a documentary about gleaners, people who follow after the harvest has been collected, to pick the fruit that was left behind. Varda shows people who find food and other treasures in vineyards, fields, and urban markets. Some live on the food and money they make from the objects they find. Some turn them into art. The film is a history of gleaning, a portrait of gleaners, a meditation on aging, a subtle examination of the artist as a gleaner, of the documentarian as a person who collects treasures from the world around her. Both films are about excess and waste, beauty and love. They are about the strength and fragility of people – in body and spirit. In both films, many of the people we meet have been living in this way, literally on the outskirts of society, since childhood, even for generations. They’re bright and energetic and resilient, but both films are permeated with an atmosphere of mortality and decay. The stories of the catadores and the gleaners remind us that life is fragile, and our position in society is more so. In this country we talk about a “safety net,” which seems to have failed many of these people completely. And yet they’ve built their own community to protect each other, and care for each other, to feed each other – they’ve built libraries and learning centers. Aunt Irma has set up huge pots in Jardim Gramacho, and she cooks for the pickers, using food thrown away by grocery stores and restaurants, brought to her as fresh as possible. She seems so happy with her life, and her role of feeding her friends, that it made me weepy. I could go on and on! Both films contained layer upon layer of meaning and beauty and emotion.

Kohlrabi slaw with walnut/scallion dressing

But I’ll move right along now, to tell you about a meal that we partially gleaned. We were walking home from rec camp, on a blisteringly hot day. We passed a table with an awning covered with baskets of vegetables. It was part of an outreach program from Fisherman’s Mark, a local organization, called Farmers, Families, and Fisherman’s Mark. Local farms bring their excess produce, or the produce that’s just nearly past it, and they teach classes on nutrition, and provide demonstrations of easy ways to prepare the vegetables. We stopped for a glass of ice water, a moment in the shade and a chat, and left with some burstingly ripe tomatoes, a few kohlrabi, and a loaf of day-old whole grain bread. It was nearly too hot to cook, even for me, so we decided to open a can of chickpeas, and toss them with tomatoes, toasted cubes of bread, pesto, and small chunks of mozzarella cheese. All to be served over fresh and crispy baby arugula. I decided to cook the tomatoes just for a second, because I like how saucy they get, and I like the fact that they melt the cheese a little bit, but you could leave this step out, especially if you have fresh mozzarella! And I made the kohlrabi into a sweet and spicy slaw with carrots and a walnut scallion dressing.

Here’s Apfelsextet, by Pierre Barbaud from the Gleaners and I.
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Creamy vegan cole slaw

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Vegan cole slaw

The first apartment that David and I rented together was the second floor of a two-story house. The first floor was occupied by our landlady. She was a nice elderly woman who was very very anxious about the well-being of her second-floor apartment. When it rained she would call and tell us to close the windows. When something broke, she would trundle up the back stairs with a big roll of tape and put it back together. “To tape!” she would exclaim, giving us an insight into her home improvement methodology. With admirable regularity, she cooked a dish that, apparently, took the whole day to make. Starting early in the morning, the fragrance would waft up our back stairs and wend its way into our open windows. We called it “rubber glove stew.” The smell got stronger as the day wore on, and it clung to our furniture for days. I’m fairly certain that the stew contained cabbage, and, to this day, the smell of over-boiled cabbage makes me feel a little queasy. Poor stinky brassica! I do like cooked cabbage in certain situations, of course – quickly sauteed and wrapped in moo shoo pancakes is always nice! But when we got a lovely head of cabbage from our CSA, I decided to keep it raw and make (more) coleslaw. I’ve made lightly olive-oil-and-balsamic-dressed slaws recently with various fruits, nuts and cheeses to mix things up a bit. This time I wanted to make something that tasted more like a traditional cole slaw, but with a creamy almond dressing instead of mayonnaise. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I think it came out really well! Nice and sweet and crunchy and tangy and savory. The slaw is something of a prototype, because I kept it very simple. You could easily add any other thing you generally like in coleslaw. You could easily add roasted garlic or herbs to the dressing.

Here’s Cab Calloway & Dizzy Gillespie with Pickin’ the Cabbage. According to the scholars of youTube this is Gillespie’s first composition! He was 22!
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Coleslaw with apples, sharp cheddar and hazelnuts

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Coleslaw with apples and cheddar

Hello, my dears! We’ve been in Cape May for a few days. For those not familiar with Cape May, it’s a small town on the very southern tip of New Jersey. It’s a shore shangri-la! Unlike many places at the shore, it had a bit of shade. It has lovely gardens and shady streets, and it also happens to be a place that birds, well, flock to. You have your shore birds, of course, and you busy house wrens, with all of their chattering, sweetly bubbling drama, you have your migratory warblers. And I could swear I saw a magpie! Of course we don’t have magpies in New Jersey, but as the bird books will tell you, birds frequently accidentally or casually visit Cape May. I love the idea of an accidental visitor, especially if the visitor is a bird. We were casual visitors to Cape May, and we had a lovely time. Malcolm is a reckless & graceful water dog. If he sees the water, he must be in it, and he’s a natural at swimming in waves. Isaac, who can’t swim yet, is far more cautious. I worry that he’s absorbing my anxieties, because for some strange reason, for the past few years I’ve had a strange fear of swimming in the ocean. I didn’t used to be this way! I don’t like being turned upside down, and discombobulated. I don’t like my feet pulled one way, and my head the other, and my whole self powerless to keep my bearings. Well…you know what’s more fun than doing something you’re comfortable with? Doing something you’re a little bit scared of, but you know is fun. Malcolm explained how to do it. You watch the waves for a while, to understand their pattern. Then you walk sideways, feeling with your left foot, to the point where the sand drops off a few feet. Then…you…leap! I was so happy! It was a really heart-poundingly ecstatic feeling, being in the waves with Malcolm and David. The water was lovely, cloudy celadon green, the sky round and vast and clear. There were dolphins playing a hundred yards out. We were swimming in the same water as dolphins! If you stood with your arms out, and your toes just touching the ground, the swell of the wave would lift you gently and rock you, and you’d hang suspended and breathless, until it softly set you in the sand again. Sometimes two waves would come in quick succession, and you’d hover in the water, waiting to be set down, but delighted to be lifted up.

I could go on and on about it (and I probably will!) but it’s back to life, back to reality, back to work, so I’ll keep it brief for now.

I’ll tell you about this simple coleslaw. This is a nice summer salad, because it’s supremely easy to prepare, and it’s light and clean, but quite substantial, too. It’s good to take to the shore, because cabbage, apples and carrots all travel well in a cooler. Apples and sharp cheddar are a classic combination, of course, and they’re nice here with the sweet bite of cabbage, and the nutty crunch of hazelnuts. I dressed this really simply, with olive oil, white wine vinegar, salt and lots of pepper. You could get fancier, with maybe a little dijon or honey or lemon, but I think the grated cheese added enough creaminess that a traditionally creamy dressing would have been too much too much. Isaac called this the “white salad,” and he liked it a lot. First he picked the hazelnuts out. Then, when everybody else had left the table and we were cleaning up, I glanced outside and saw him finishing it up. He cleaned his plate.

Here’s Summersong from The Decemberists. And summer arrives with a length of lights!
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Toasted hominy and avocado salad

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Toasted hominy salad

It seems to me that we usually have a string of days in June that are perfect. The air is creamy and cool and full of sweet wildflower smells and sharp lemony grassy ferny smells. It’s a little warm in the afternoon, maybe, but in the morning and evening you want to sit and bathe in the sweet air. You want to be aware of how lovely the air is at this moment, because it doesn’t happen very often. It’s so easy to notice when it’s freezing, or broiling, or insufferably humid. But this unsurpassable perfection, this ultimate air, as my boys would say, is easy to overlook. For some reason, when the air is like this, it makes me think about flying. I think about flying a lot, actually. Not with my rational brain (precious little of that!) but in dreams, and now and then through the day. We went on a bike ride this morning, and that feels like flying. We ride on a towpath between the canal and the river. The towpath is raised considerably above the water on either side, in most places, so as you ride birds will swoop along next to you, and you’ll feel like you’re flying with them. This morning we saw a turtle in the glowing brown water – head out, rough, wrinkled legs swirling in the water. It looked like a remarkably pleasant thing to do. That’s what this air feels like! Sometimes, as I’m walking, I’ll sense the weight of the air on my arms, and I’ll swoosh them up slightly, feeling the air move all around them, and I almost feel as though I very nearly know what it might be like to take off in flight. I told David this and he asked if I’d been eating any of the unidentified herbs in the garden. Heh heh. Try it! Here’s a diagram…

1. stand with your arms at your sides, relaxed.
2. Press your hands backwards sllighty – maybe a foot – with a slightly curved motion
3. Swoop them slowly forward – not too far, just like a dog begging, maybe. It’s all about the swoop, I think.

Anyway – you don’t want to be inside too long cooking on a day like this, so you want to make a quick and delicious and substantial salad, such as this one. A perfectly ripe avocado is a thing of wonder, too. In this dish, we find such an avocado combined with tomatoes, cilantro, basil, salad burnet (which tastes like cucumbers – fresh!), hominy that’s been toasted with sage and oregano, and a chipotle balsamic sort of dressing. Toasted hominy is nice – it doesn’t get puffy or crispy, but it crackles and pops while it cooks. The warmth of it makes the tomatoes and olive oil lovely and fragrant and just a little soft. We ate this with basmati rice, fresh farm lettuce, and homemade tortilla chips (that’s a flour tortilla sliced in triangles and lightly fried in olive oil). But you could easily eat it with warm soft tortillas.

Here’s Flying Birds by RZA. It sounds like wings pulling through the weight of the air!
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Arugula salad with apricots, pecans and french feta

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As you are no doubt aware, I am the esteemed authoress of a wildly popular series of books about the marked similarities to be found in the writings of Tolstoy and the rappings of many rappers. Weighty volumes. I am, of course, also the producer of the soon-to-be-a-smash hip hopera version of War and Peace (would you look at the date on that? I’m making very…slow…progress on this novel!) Okay, I’m prepared to admit that none of that is true. However, ever since I spoke of Dostoyevsky and Talib Kweli yesterday, I’ve had a yen to chat about these same similarities. Which I will do after the jump. You’ve been warned!
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Golden beet & goat cheese tarte tatin AND Roasted beets with french feta and hazelnuts

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Beet tarte tatin

I’m going to be 43 this month, and yesterday I bought reading glasses for the first time. Apparently this is very predictable behavior, and exactly the age one’s eyes are supposed to stop working. Sigh. I bought the glasses so I could get on with a paperback copy of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, which has the most fiendishly small cramped letters I have every seen. I suppose I could have just bought another copy of the book, but it’s not just this paperback. It’s other books, too, anything with small print…particularly at the end of the day. It’s time I faced a fact that is right in front of my face – literally, because I have to hold it very close or I can’t see it.

I’m making slow progress with The Bros. Karamazov, but I’m enjoying it so much. I love to read novels in which the characters think so deeply and question everything – their lives, their souls their place in the world and society – to such an extent that this becomes a huge part of the drama. Levin’s musings at the end of Anna Karenina make me weepy! His story should be over, if you take it plot point by plot point, but there’s so much he doesn’t understand! When I was little I used to think about things in this way (at least that’s how I remember it). I used to try to figure it all out, and understand how I fit in with everything, and get all confused, and then have little flashes of clarity where certain things made sense. And then I’d heat up some frozen french fries and pore over a Tintin. I was a weird kid!! At some point I stopped thinking about it so much…everything goes so fast you get swept along, hour to hour, day to day. Maybe it’s better that way…there’s something to be said for just getting on with your day, getting things done. And we’ll always have Russian novels! And you just know they’re eating beets, because, um, borscht is Russian, right? We got some red beets from our CSA, and then I went to a market and saw some big beautiful golden beets, and I couldn’t resist! So we’ve got beets for weeks. I decided to make a beet tarte tatin. This is an upside-down tart, usually involving apples and caramel. I thought it would be nice to make a savory version with beets, because they’re so sweet that they seem to form their own caramel when you cook them. (I’ve tried it in the past with green tomatoes and that turned out well!) I added some balsamic, lemon zest, orange juice and goat cheese – a few tart, bright elements to offset the earthy sweetness of the beets. I think it came out really well! I cooked all the beets, and then I had too many to fit in one layer, so I made two layers. I think, if I had a do over, I’d make one layer of beets, and save the rest to toss with pasta or chop into a salad, because the two layers of beets was very beet-y. Delicious, though, if you like beets!! With a real tarte tatin, you use a skillet to caramelize the apples, then you put the dough right on that and put the whole thing in the oven. I wasn’t sure my skillet could handle it, so I transfered it to a cake pan. If you have a big, oven-proof skillet, though – you’re golden!!

And the other day, I made a nice salad-ish meal with roasted beets and potatoes, sliced thin, and sprinkled with french feta and hazelnuts. The whole assemblage being made upon a bed of arugula. I used a combination of red beets, golden beets, red bliss potatoes and yukon gold potatoes, and it was very pretty indeed!!

Here’s The Perfect Beet by Talib Kweli & KRS One. What? What? It’s beat? Ohhhh. These two men think a lot, and tell us all about it.
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