Savour Fare » Salads

Essential Potato Salad

Kate — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:44:35 +0000

Labor Day weekend is bittersweet, like the end of an affair. Three days of sunshine, of flip-flops, of beaches and barbecue. But Tuesday lurks around the corner, like a raincloud with the smell of ozone to the air. There’s almost a sense of desperation — just one more cookout! — before fall settles in, with its dark evenings, the smell of cinnamon and freshly-sharpened pencils, and its long march to winter.

I’ve been busy collecting summer, whether it’s making just one more fresh fruit pie, canning a batch of tomato jam, downing bottles of rose, or just sneaking outside to enjoy the sunset. I keep getting ideas and checking them off the list: Hollywood Bowl tickets, picnics, Lemonade! And one of my favorite summer foods is potato salad. I wanted to get in one more potato salad before roast potatoes become de rigueur.

I love old fashioned potato salad made by my grandmother, but this isn’t that. I also love newfangled potato salads, but this isn’t that, either. This is potato salad reduced to its essentials — a little mayonnaise, a sprinkle of tart vinegar, the oniony breath of chives, and at the end, a dusting of lemon, to add aroma and color, to wake the tastebuds and make the salad sing. It’s hardly a recipe at all, but it’s well worth making all the same, in this last weekend of summer.
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Japanese Ramen Salad

Kate — Fri, 20 May 2011 22:46:37 +0000

It’s far too cold in Los Angeles this week to even think of having a picnic, or eating a salad. We’ve had rain and fog and nighttime temperatures in the 40′s. I’ve been digging out my thick sweaters and my boots and thinking of building a fire in the fireplace. It’s MAY, people! I live in Los Angeles! Apparently Mother Nature didn’t get the message.

Regardless of the weather, Memorial Day is around the corner! Which means PICNICS! And POTLUCKS! Or mayonnaise slowly congealing in the hot sun until it becomes liquid death, and “I’m a vegetarian/lactose intolerant/in a neurotic relationship with pasta.” Well, given these parameters, have I got the dish for you. I got it from my friend Corrine (of the apparently departed casavillecooking) who deals with dairy and egg allergies in her family, and is therefore a great source of vegan and dairy-free recipes. This dish is a perfect potluck dish — it’s vegan (or not, depending on your additions), dairy-free, egg-free, and not too starchy. You can make it gluten-free by replacing the ramen noodles with rice noodles fried in a little oil. It’s also easy and quick to make, can be scaled up or down, and can be adapted to suit your tastes and your audience. With no mayonnaise, it will hold for a few hours without refrigeration (it also makes a great brown bag lunch dish). And did I mention it’s delicious? Flavorful, kid friendly — it even features healthy vegetables!

So really, what are you waiting for?

Oh yeah, the recipe.

Recipe
Japanese Ramen Salad
Adapted from Casaville Cooking
Salad:
8 green onions, finely sliced
1 lb shredded green cabbage
two 3 oz packages of ramen noodles, broken
1/4 cup toasted sliced almonds
1/4 cup toasted sesame seeds
6-8 oz. firm seasoned tofu, cut into cubes OR 6-8 oz. cooked chicken, cut into cubes (optional)

Dressing:

Place chopped cabbage, green onions, sesame seeds and almonds in a large bowl. Toss with dressing and cover overnight. Toss before serving

Dressing

3 T sugar
1/3 cup olive oil or peanut oil
6 T rice vinegar
1 tsp sesame oil
Salt and Pepper to taste

In a large bowl, combine scallions, cabbage, ramen noodles, almonds, sesame seeds, and tofu or chicken. Toss lightly to combine. Combine all ingredients for dressing, toss with salad. This can be made in advance.

California Pizza Kitchen Barbecue Chicken Chopped Salad

Kate — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 12:48:23 +0000

Back in the day when I lived in New York, I was more than a little homesick. I pined and yearned for my home state of California, and pounced on everything I could find that reminded me of home. I wore flipflops at the very first sign of spring in the city (and narrowly avoided frostbite in the process), I saw the movie Sideways 3 times in the theaters, and bought the DVD when it was released; I traveled all the way to TENTH AVENUE to find a tiny taqueria in the back of a bodega that sold real tacos; I listened to the Beach Boys on repeat. So you can imagine how happy I was when the last apartment we lived in in Manhattan was right next door to a California Pizza Kitchen (it also had a balcony, which means my poor husband was sent outside to grill in 50 degree weather. He was happy when we finally moved to California because I immediately started wearing black and wanting to see foreign films in a desperate cling to my New York days). Now I realize that California Pizza Kitchen is about as truly Californian as Red Lobster is truly a restaurant of Maine, but I was desperate.

And the truth is, I kind of liked their food. Sure, peanut butter is not my FAVORITE topping on pizza, and some of those combinations were just weird, but the barbecue chicken chopped salad was quite tasty and quickly became my go to order.

And then I moved to L.A., and I could get REAL Mexican food, and if I want fancy pizza I could go to Spago, where it all began. And California Pizza Kitchen was no longer convenient, and when you actually live in California, it’s probably not something you’re going to go out of your way to visit. So no more CPK for me.

But I missed that chicken salad. Salty, crunchy, a little sweet, with the tang of barbecue sauce and the mellowness of ranch dressing. I WANTED that chicken salad. So I decided to make my own.
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Giveaway, The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth and Endive Salad with Bacon

Kate — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:22:12 +0000

As I may have mentioned before, I generally receive a several cookbooks for major gift-giving occasions. This isn’t surprising; after all, I have a known cookbook problem, and I have several cookbooks on my Amazon wishlist. I’m fairly familiar with the major cookbooks that are released, what the buzz is, and what the classics are. But this Christmas my aunt (who is a fantastic cook) gave me a book I had never heard of — the Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, by Roy Andries De Groot. “It’s the book that inspired Alice Waters,” she told me. I thanked her politely and added the book to my already crowded shelf of food and cookbooks.

A month or so later, I had finished my book club book for that month and was looking for something to read, and my eye fell on the Auberge. The book is unassuming, with its seventies cover and relatively unknown author (who was at some point the President of the Gourmet Club, which I’m sure had some real meaning in 1973, but sounds made up to me, like something an enterprising high school student would use to pad their college application), but I thought it would be an excellent soothing bedtime read.
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A Controversial Classic — Caesar Salad

Kate — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:11:06 +0000

Well, that was a nice little break eh? All the holiday hoopla, then a week to catch your breath before we launch right back into decadent, gooey pastries and … oh wait. It’s January. Everyone’s on a diet. Real Food it is.

To be honest, although I love pulling out the stops for a meal like our New Year’s Eve feast, it’s quite a relief to get back to cooking every day food – I crave things that taste clean and are simple to prepare. Classics that you can turn to again and again without tiring of them. Like Caesar salad.

This is my mom’s Caesar salad, and it’s the one I grew up with, and the one she is (justly) famous for. It’s classic, it’s simple, it’s clean, and it’s packed with flavor. There are more versions of Caesar salad in the world than I can count, ranging from the elegant tableside preparation you can still see at some old school restaurants (like the Athenaeum, Cal Tech’s faculty club) to the behemoth served with grilled chicken slices at the Cheesecake Factory. You can also buy premade “Caesar” dressings at the grocery store, which often have added sugar, added preservatives, and in the case of one dressing by Kraft, added bacon. (While I have no beef with bacon, I wouldn’t necessarily think of it in connection with a Caesar salad). What constitutes a Caesar salad is hotly contested, but lemon, garlic, parmesan cheese and romaine lettuce are standard. Raw egg yolk, another traditional ingredient, gives the food police heart palpitations, and then there are the dreaded anchovies, which many people and restaurants omit out of some anchovy fear or some misguided attachment to “authenticity” (the original Caesar salad, invented by Caesar Cardini in 1924 in Tijuana, Mexico had no anchovies other than those found in the Worcestershire sauce.

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Ring in the New Year with Black Eyed Pea and 3 Pepper Salsa

Kate — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 19:22:55 +0000

New Year’s Day is really a strange holiday. Everyone celebrates hard on New Year’s Eve, leaving the holiday itself as a day to lie around, nurse your hangover, and watch the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl on TV (which is an excellent hangover nursing activity, though perhaps I’m a little biased towards the Rose Parade since I grew up in Pasadena).

But New Year’s Day has some lovely traditions, most of which are associate with the idea of beginning the New Year as you mean to go on. My friend Rebecca spends all of New Year’s Day doing activities she hopes to do throughout the year — spending time with her family, doing the things she loves. This is a tradition I try to aim for, but I’ve already spent more time doing dishes this morning (a byproduct of the fancy New Year’s Eve dinner I cooked, which I’ll tell you about at some point) than I would like to for the rest of the year. Still, I’ve also spent time reading, talking to my husband, exercising, and calling old friends on the telephone. Later, I plan to go out to lunch with my husband and spend some quality time with my daughter and my parents, and of course, cooking.

There are also traditional foods that should be eaten on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, which are supposed to bring luck and prosperity in the New Year. Greens (to represent money) and pork (to represent progress) are often named, but it’s black eyed peas that are most often thought to bring luck, in a tradition that dates back to 500 AD. My New Year’s Day tradition, then, is to make a variant of this dish to bring luck in the New Year. It also has the added advantage of being healthy and delicious, so if I begin as I mean to go on, this is a great beginning.
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Flavors of Fall — Arugula Salad with Persimmons and Gouda

Kate — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:47:56 +0000

Fall produce – what do you think of? Apples, of course. Brussels Sprouts. Take a page from Thanksgiving and think sweet potatoes and cranberries. And pumpkins are, of course, inescapable, their leering visages popping up everywhere you go. Although I personally love all of these, the autumn crop which gets me all hot and bothered is the persimmon.

When I was a kid, persimmons were not as widely available as they are now, but they grow quite well in Southern California (and the trees are beautiful — they bear fruit after they lose their leaves, and look like they’re decorated for the holidays), and my family always looked for persimmons in the fall and winter. We used the Hachiya variety, which is elongated and heart shaped, and terribly astringent unless it’s gloriously squishily ripe, in breads, muffins and the annual Christmas night dessert of steamed persimmon pudding. The squatter, firmer Fuyu, which can be eaten when still firm, were eaten out of hand or used in salads, like this one.

If you’ve never had a persimmon, the flavor is very sweet and not at all acidic, but it has a slight spicy edge that makes it fit perfectly into autumn. Th sweet hachiya has an almost jelly-like texture when ripe — I like to freeze them, then partially thaw them and eat them with a spoon. The fuyu is eaten when firm, though not quite as crisp as an apple. The shiny skin adds an additional layer of texture, with a pleasing snap and and almost grainy feel that’s reminiscent of a good pear. They add a layer of sweetness but also crunch to any dish that they are added to.
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© Kate for Savour Fare, 2009. | Permalink |
Post tags: cheese, fall, Gluten Free, persimmons, salad, Thanksgiving, Vegetables, Vegetarian