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.
Entries Tagged as 'Quick'
Essential Potato Salad
September 1st, 2011 · 2 Comments · Entertaining, Make Ahead, Quick, Recipes, Salads, Seasonal, Summer, Vegetables and Sides
French Onion Dip — Homemade in the Crockpot
January 27th, 2011 · 15 Comments · Entertaining, Make Ahead, Quick, Recipes, Soups and Starters, Vegetarian
If I want onion dip for the Superbowl, I could use the classic recipe: open a packet of Lipton’s soup mix and a container of sour cream, mix them together and have a fat bowl of MSG, corn syrup and unpronounceable things with a side of my entire RDA of sodium. Or I could make onion dip from scratch, controlling the ingredients myself, adding the right amount of salt, and slowly caramelizing the onions to add depth of flavor. Of course, caramelized onions require a long period of cooking them in a skillet, stirring frequently to make sure they don’t scorch, waiting for those Maillard reactions to hurry up and happen. Or you could just use a crockpot.
Tags: crockpot·Quick·snacks·Vegetarian
Daring Bakers Goes to Canada — Nutella Nanaimo Bars and Graham Crackers
January 27th, 2010 · 26 Comments · Baked Goods and Desserts, Make Ahead, Recipes
It’s time for the Daring Bakers again, and while this month’s challenge presented its own obstacles, It had the advantage over last month’s challenge for me by 1) Taking only a reasonable amount of time, 2) Not leaving my entire house covered in royal icing and 3) resulting in something that I would actually like to eat. Wait, maybe that last one isn’t such a good thing. My thighs aren’t thanking me for these suckers. (Fortunately, my husband’s colleagues are — thank goodness for willing recipients of sugary treats).
The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and www.nanaimo.ca.
If you’ve never heard of Nanaimo bars, they’re as fun to eat as they are to say (they’re pronounced nuh NIE mo). A local specialty invented in Nanaimo, British Columbia (Lauren chose them in honor of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver), they are relatively easy to assemble (if you don’t make your own graham crackers). The bottom is a rich crumb crust flavored with cocoa, coconut and nuts, topped with a sweet icing layer and finally a chocolate ganache. To spice things up, and because I had some hazelnuts I wanted to use, I elected to make chocolate hazelnut nanaimo bars, using toasted hazelnuts in the bottom layer and making a nutella flavored icing for the middle layer. They were incredibly rich, incredibly sweet, and a little addictive.
Tags: chocolate·cookies·Daring Bakers·Quick
