Holy moley, look at the temperature out there! It’s been hovering near 100 for a week. Not when you want to heat up the house with cooking. It is definitely salad time. So last night I fell back on an old favorite: Salade Nicoise, a French composed salad. As with so many iconic dishes, there…
Quick Eats: Middle Eastern Grain Salad
This is less a recipe than an idea. A really tasty, simple, healthful idea. It came about from a half-cup of leftover bulgur, a fridge full of odds and ends with a vaguely Middle Eastern flair, and a need for lunch. I tried something similar with quinoa and with brown rice, also to good effect….
Grilled Romaine Cobb Salad
I’ve been trying to recall where I first ate grilled romaine. I remember the salad itself, and my surprise and delight at the preparation. It was a Caesar salad, bright with lemon and smoky from the grill, a little shriveled and blackened on the ends. I think it was at the brilliant – and sadly…
Quick Eats: Melon and Feta Salad
Apparently it’s not so uncommon nowadays, but I first heard of melon and feta together in Nigella Lawson’s book Forever Summer – recently re-released as Nigella Fresh. (A hardback copy of the original Forever Summer is listed on Amazon.com for the unlikely price of $7,607.21.) Nigella’s version is much more complex than mine – and,…
Warm Scallop, Sweet Corn, and Avocado Salad
Welcome to the dog days of summer. It is HOT outside, and not too pleasant in the house at midday either. You know, midday, say 2:00 to 5:00 or so, the hottest, stickiest part of the day – and the time when you have to start planning dinner. I dreamed up this recipe on one…
Creamy Honey Mustard Salad Dressing
A little over a year ago I swore off bottled salad dressings. I grew up on Kraft dressing – sticky white ranch, sweet and oily dark-red Catalina, and (my favorite) bright orange French. I’d stopped using those several years before when the tangy orange dressing stopped tasting pleasant to me and just tasted like chemicals….
Sichuan Hot-and-Numbing (Ma La) Cucumber Salad
Following my great success with Fuschia Dunlop’s second cookbook, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province, I decided to go back to her first book, Land of Plenty, on Sichuan food. I love cucumber salads and am always on the lookout for a new one. (The old salt-sugar-chile-vinegar one pales after a few hundred variations.)…
Winter Citrus Salad
It’s mid-winter, and let’s face it, even the Co-op and the CSA can’t provide much excitement in the produce department. The season provides plenty of two things: greens and citrus. I used some greens in yesterday’s Ghanaian Peanut Stew, but I still had a bunch of oranges and grapefruit in the bottom of my CSA…