Spring salad EXPLOSION!

Every week, I buy a head of romaine from the nice people at the farmers market who sell it for $1 a head. Last week, as I was leaving, I happened to also come across a free bag of baby spring mix. This week, I happened to hit the market just as they were closing. There was no more romaine, but I bought some enticing red leaf lettuce and some spinach, and the $1 a head people were packing up and trying to get rid of their greens, so they gave me some arugula as well. That's when I decided that someone was trying to tell me something about eating greens.

I still have some of the spring mix, so I'm now up to four different kinds of greens. Even if I save all the spinach for cooking (saute it with olive oil and lots of garlic and maybe some chopped red bell pepper and you will never want to eat it another way ever again), that's still so much salad! Boyfriend will eat some, but we're only human. And this means we're on the lookout for good salad recipes.

I might as well confess: I'm a salad dressing philistine. Most of the highfalutin' food writing I've read suggests that foodies love vinaigrette, but despite several years of trying, I still can't stand sharp, vinegary dressings. I especially hate the ones that are sweet (why pour corn syrup all over a perfectly good meal?), but even balsamic gets the thumbs-down. I think I was spoiled by growing up with a lemon tree; in my house, salad dressing meant me or my brother would go outside, pick a lemon and juice it into one of those commercial dressing mixes with the cruets. Fresh lemon juice is divine. Vinegar tastes, well, sour to me.

By contrast, creamy dressings are... a bit gauche. In my unlamented career as a waitress, I served hundreds of people under the age of 25, and almost all of them wanted ranch dressing on the side of their fries. And their onion rings. And their other fried stuff. And their pizza and baked potatoes. It is tasty, but not what I would call a classy habit, guys. Plus the stuff is insanely high in fat.

In the privacy of my own home, I can live with the trashiness, but not with the fat content. So I have started to develop my own dressings. Sure, they still have some fat, but at least they taste good. And they're not full of frankenfood. One is a Weight Watchers special:

1. Take however much goat cheese or other soft, strong-flavored cheese you can afford points-wise.


2. Throw it in the blender with lemon juice or a tomato or salsa (or, yes, even some balsamic vinegar).


3. Toss.

And the other is an attempt to imitate all those restaurant taco salads, but without trans fats:

1. Throw half an avocado in the blender.


2. Add enough salsa and/or lemon juice to thin it out to the right consistency and blend.


3. Toss.

While I'm at it, here's the fake taco salad recipe:

Chop a few handfuls of WASHED lettuce, preferably a nice fresh crispy one. Also chop half a tomato, some green onions and whatever else you think would taste nice. Put them in a large, sealable container.

Get some canned black beans and some frozen corn and put them in a colander. Rinse very well under a hot tap until beans are free of the canned bean goo and the corn isn't frozen anymore. Drain those well and add them to the large, sealable container.

Put the dressing in with the other stuff. Add salsa if you didn't already. Put the lid on tightly (very important) and shake the motherfucker until you think the dressing is probably well-distributed.

Open and do some stirring just to make sure. You're ready to eat, but if you want, nice additions to the top include crumbled baked corn chips, some shredded half-fat cheddar and fake chicken. (Or real chicken if that's what you do.)

Serve with fresh corn tortillas if you can get 'em.

Ironic Passover Herb Cheese Quick Bread

My boyfriend went back East for a week to have Passover with his family. He was scheduled to come back last Sunday. I got bored, so I went to the Santa Monica Farmers Market (the smaller one), bought a ton of herbs, and cooked chametz, possibly as a passive aggressive strategy to get revenge on him for leaving me alone all week. Among other things, I made an herb and cheese quick bread from the Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special cookbook.

1. Go to the farmers market. Discover that spring means lots and lots of fresh herbs. Buy basil, chives and green onions/scallions (which are not technically an herb, but do make a mighty fine addition to a salad). Here they are in that order from the left, plus some romaine lettuce, their brother in tasty greenness.

2. Put on M. Doughty's Haughty Melodic. Dance around the room to "Madeleine and Nine" while you chop everything (but the lettuce) and shove it into empty hummus or salsa containers. I can never use all my fresh herbs at once, so I generally throw them into the freezer to throw into scrambled eggs and such. Cook's Illustrated suggests that you mix them with a little water and make cubes, too, but I find there's a high rate of freezerburn on the cubes of lemon juice I've made and stored, and this works fine.

3. Dump 1 and 1/2 cups unbleached (for the love of God) white flour and 1/2 cup whole wheat flour into a bowl. (I'm sure you could mess with the ratio, but you might need a bit more liquid later if you add a lot of whole wheat.) Add one tb brown sugar, one tb baking powder and 1/2 tsp salt. Stir 'em together.

4. Next you add the herbs. This recipe calls for 1/3 cup fresh chives or scallions, 2 tb fresh parsley and 1/2 teaspoon thyme. I followed their orders on the chives and scallions, but from there, I decided to throw in a little of everything I had. That equals maybe two tb chopped fresh basil and some frozen thyme and sage saved from earlier market trips. You could also add rosemary, chevril, tarragon, etc. -- rosemary grows so well in our climate that people use it to landscape, so it's easy to get if you're willing to walk around the neighborhood for ten minutes and wash it really, really well afterward. It's got blue flowers and you can smell it on humid nights.

5. Next: 1 and 1/2 cups crumbled sharp cheddar. Again, I went way off the reservation on this, throwing in whatever cheese I had around, which included a little half-fat cheddar, a little half-fat swiss, and a lot of Italian full-fat parmagiano that I inherited when my good friend moved to San Francisco and willed her cheeses to me. Right after my other friend came back from Italy with ANOTHER block of parmagiano for me. I love my friends. Any strong cheese would probably go well here, but they're right about crumbling it instead of shredding it; you want biggish nuggets of cheese in the final product. Trader Joe's double Gloucester would probably be divine here. Or goat cheese. YMMV.

6. Stir the motherfucker well, then add the liquid ingredients, which you have conveniently stirred together off-camera. They include one egg beaten into 3/4 cup milk.

7. This recipe says to stir them together "until just combined." This did not work for me; I needed to throw in a little extra splash of water to get everything to combine. Whether you need to do this probably depends on your flour. Anyway, because of this, I ended up with a ball of dough that I could more or less lift out of the bowl and into the (pre-greased with olive oil spray) loaf pan; I didn't need a rubber scraper like they said. But it was useful for smoothing the thing out into a proper loaf.

8. Bake at 375 degrees F for 40 to 45 minutes. Test by sticking a knife into it; if the knife comes out clean, it's showtime. While you're waiting, restart Haughty Melodic and make some orange-chocolate muffins with the muffin tin your boyfriend insisted that you buy:

...and some pesto, which is the easiest thing in the world when you have a food processor. (Throw mabye 1/2 cup fresh basil leaves in the processor, along with a handful of pine nuts or walnuts [if they smell funny and you've had 'em awhile, don't use 'em], a couple garlic cloves, a little salt, some more parmigiano and just enough olive oil to grease the works. As the blade spins, add more olive oil until it reaches the consistency you like. Throw into fridge and enjoy at your leisure.)

9. When bread is done, wrap in foil, keep in fridge and eat fairly quickly. Mine got moldy fast. It made very fine toast, however, with or without the pesto spread on it.

When boyfriend gets home the next day, taunt him by eating all the lovely bread while he eats matzo.

After he got home, we made a kosher-for-Passover quiche with a matzo crumb crust. That's coming soon; the photos are on his camera. Also probably coming soon: some posts that aren't recipes per se; I think I'll post more often if I can use this place as a platform to talk about things like my white-trashy dislike of vinagrettes or good foods I found.

roasted beet salad

Unfortunately I'm unhappy with all the photos, so most of them are not being used.

The ingredients:



beets, shallot, slivered almonds, blue cheese (on special), balsamic vinegar, grapeseed oil and lettuce

I started by preheating my oven to 400 degrees and wrapped the beets in tinfoil. I baked them for approximately 70 minutes, but bake until a fork can easily be inserted.

While the beets were roasting, I washed my lettuce, diced the shallot, crumbled the blue cheese and whisked the grapeseed oil and balsamic vinegar.





Once the beets were cooked and cooled, I unwrapped from the tinfoil and under running water, peeled the skin from the beet and sliced.

Basically the salad is simple to put together. Bite sized pieces of lettuce, of your choice, sliced beets, diced onion, crumbled blue cheese, some sliced almonds, a little salt and some cracked pepper and then the balsamic and oil mixture. Delicious. I ate it for dinner and made a second for my breakfast.