Category Archives: salad

Warm greek salad for a cold day

Posted on by
Reply

I love salad, it’s my favorite thing, and I want to eat it every night! But it can be so disappointing this time of year. Hard, flavorless tomatoes, pale icy lettuces. Bleh. So we’ve reinvented the salad to be a warm mix of lightly cooked vegetables mixed with olive oil, balsamic and herbs, and topped with crumbly, melty cheese. I decided to make a version of a Greek salad, because I had olives and feta, but you could do this with any mix of vegetables, herbs, and the cheese of your choice. It would be good with chard, fennel and goat cheese, or pears, walnuts and bleu. You could mix up the vinegars as well, if you’re feeling fancy. Or try nut oils. (I don’t have any, but I wish I did!) The trick is to cook the vegetables just as much as they need to be cooked…so they still have a bit of life and color and crunch. The cooking brings out the flavor of the winter tomatoes and the herbs. I used Kale, because it has such a nice texture and flavor once it’s cooked. Do the Kale a favor and cook it earlier in the day when nobody is around, then drain it and put it in the fridge till you’re ready to assemble everything. It tastes so much better than it smells when it’s cooking! And I added raw spinach right at the end, which wilts slightly as it meets the other warm vegetables, adding some brightness and crunch.

Here’s Blind Willie McTell with Warm it up to Me
Continue reading →

carrots & fennel braised in white wine with star anise

Posted on by
3

I’m slightly obsessed with star anise at the moment! It’s so pretty and so tasty. Warm, a little sweet, a little spicy. I have several bunches of carrots from the CSA, and this seemed like a nice thing to do with them. Simple, satisfying, the sweetness of the star anise complements that of the carrots, but lets them shine in all their carrotyness. You could make this without the fennel, but it seemed to fit so perfectly, being another fall veg with a sweetish edge, and matching nicely with the flavor of the anise. This is good warm when you make it, and cool as a little salad the next day.

Here’s MF Doom’s Star Anis, another one of my favorites!
Continue reading →

Toasted beets

Posted on by
3

My nine-year-old son invented this method of preparing beets, and it’s really tasty! Only slightly eclipsed by my five-year-old son’s suggestion that we have roasted cheese puffs for dinner.

I didn’t think I liked beets at all, but we got some from our CSA over the summer – I tried roasting them, and quickly became a convert. One day my son said, “Why don’t we grate them and toast them?” Well, we did. We grated them, tossed them with a little olive oil, and put them in the toaster oven, on “toast.” The result was wonderful! It really smells like burnt sugar as they cook, so sweet are beets. We stirred them around a little bit, and cooked them until they started to turn very dark and caramelize. They’re lovely, because you get little patches of bright, juicy beets, and little pockets of crispy, caramelized beets. We salted them and loaded them with freshly ground pepper, and tossed them in a salad. Last night I made a salad with lots of different greens, Malcolm’s beets, goat cheese, hazelnuts, tomatoes, olive oil & balsamic. Malcolm also had the bright idea of putting grated, toasted beets into a tomato sauce, which adds a nicely sweet and earthy element to the acidic sauce. If you don’t have a toaster oven, you can roast them in a hot regular oven, and it should work just as well.

Here’s one of my sons’ favorite songs at the moment, M.I.A.’s Hussel. Hello my friend, hello my friend, hello my friend, yes it’s me!

How I dress a salad

Posted on by
8

“…people got too many things on they lettuces…”

(this is a quote from K’naan’s wonderful track Wash it Down. Give it a listen while you toss your lettuces)
K'naan – Wash it Down

simple salad

I love salad. I make a salad almost every night of my life. I almost consider the salad the center of the meal, and everything else as a side dish that goes along with it. I have a very simple way of making salads, I like to let the flavor of the greens speak for itself. So here’s what I do.
Continue reading →