Salad - Retro Food For Modern Times

Category: Salad

09
Mar
2020

Name Plates: Caesar Salad

categories: Name Plates, Salad, United States of America

Today we are celebrating the Ides of March with, what else but, a Caesar Salad. The 15th of March may not have been a good day for old Julius C but, any day in my book is a good day to eat this classic American salad!

The Waldorf Salad may be the funniest American salad but the Caesar salad has to the most highly accoladed:

In the 1940’s Gourmet Magazine called it ‘the gastronomic highlight of the current moment’
In 1953 it was hailed as ‘the greatest recipe to originate in the Americas in 50 years’ by the International Society of Epicures.
Julia Childs called it “a sensation of a salad from coast to coast”

High praise for some dressed lettuce leaves!!!

What is Caesar Salad?

I feel like this is a little bit like trying to explain what is water. Caesar Salad is everywhere. And everyone “knows” what it is. And everyone has their own recipe. But let’s try to break it down a little bit….

Caesar Salad was created in 1924 by Caesar Cardini in his restaurant in Tijuana Mexico. The OG version was romaine (cos) lettuce leaves dressed in a mixture of garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, egg yolk, Worchestershire sauce, anchovies and parmesan cheese, topped with a lone crostini, black pepper and more parmesan cheese.

No bacon
No poached eggs
No multiple croutons

I love this more austere version of what we have come to see as a “typical” Caesar Salad.

Although I am not averse to any of the above and, indeed I usually include all of them when I make a “Caesar Salad” my purist heart balks at adding

Chicken
Kale
Prawns
Avocado, or
Lobster

I love all of those things. And they all have their place. But that place is not in my Caesar Salad. And I will silently judge you if you choose to give them a place in yours.

But I will not be so quiet if you give me, or choose for yourself, a so-called Caesar salad that contains pasta, pesto, quinoa, is served in wonton cups or comes atop of pizza. Because, those things maybe something. But what they are not is the ingredients of a goddamn Caesar Salad!!!

You will need to beware the Ides O’ March if any of those ends up in my Caesar!

By the way, the Cardini restaurant still exists and if you so desire you can drop by and have one of the ensaladeros make you a Caesar salad at your table just like they did back in the day!

Which has made that restaurant in Tijuana top five in my bucket list of places to eat.

If this damn virus ever abates and we can all travel again.

I Digress

Skip over this bit if you are only interested in Caesar Salad

Can we just stop and talk about Covid-19 for a mo?

We haven’t formally been told that we have to, but my work is encouraging everyone to work from home. There was a really weird atmosphere on Friday as everyone was packing up their stuff before heading home. It was like it was Christmas in that we felt like it might be a while before we saw each other again. But like Christmas with all the joy sucked out of it.

They’ve cancelled the Grand Prix which was meant to be in Melbourne this weekend and the Comedy Festival. They cancelled the Robbie Williams concert on Saturday but not the New Order concert I went to on the same night. By the way, the icing on the cake for that show was, as the house lights came up at the end of the gig, the song ushering us all out of the venue was REM’s It’s The End of The World As We Know It.

You can’t buy hand sanitizer, toilet paper or tissues for love or money. The supermarket shelves are largely empty of all non-perishable items.

Because I will be working from home for the indefinite future I went online tonight to buy a monitor that I can plug my work laptop into so that whilst keeping myself safe from the coronavirus I am not giving myself massive eyestrain. At one point I was trying to log on to our biggest office supplies company on two different laptops and my phone and it took FOREVER to finally make my purchase. I’m sensing monitors may join toilet paper and Graham Gene Potter on Australia’s most-wanted list!

What is happening in all your countries in reaction to the virus? Are you scared? Worried? Bored?

I am about 1% worried for my personal safety. I am mildly asthmatic so I am already slightly compromised on a respiratory front I am more scared for my mother who is obvs older and massively asthmatic.

I am also really annoyed that people have responded to this in the way they have in relation to panic buying.

I have been listening to the wonderful podcast American Hysteria recently and so much of what I am seeing resonates with what I have heard on there. Can we please all just calm the farm down in this?

And just to lighten the tone? Mystery solved!

Who, Who Was Caesar?

Caesar Cardini was an Italian immigrant to the United States who, along with his brother Alex, opened restaurants in San Diego and Tijuana. If you recall, the United States was under Prohibition from 1920 through to 1933. Mexico was not. So many of the rich and famous, including many Hollywood stars, would cross the border to eat and, more particularly, drink. Caesar’s became a popular hangout for these people.

Legend has it, that the restaurant was particularly busy one Fourth of July weekend. Kitchen supplies were running out so Caesar had to make a salad from what was on hand…ecco! Caesar Salad was born.

Then, as now, the Caesar salad was made tableside for a little bit of dramatic flair.

Caesar Cardini died in 1956, but as they say, the candle burned out long before the legend ever did!

The Recipe

I used this recipe from Taste for my Caesar and I can heartily recommend it.

For a more austere version, probably close to the OG version, I can also recommend Grace Kelly’s Caesar Salad as featured in Silver Screen Suppers as featured in Recipes For Rebels by all-round internet good guy Greg Swenson.

Variations

There are probably a million recipes for Caesar salad on the internet. TBH, a lot of them, as mentioned in the intro above are not “Caesar” Salads.

Choose wisely!

Modern Day Caesar

There are not that many modern-day Caesar’s.

There’s the Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan and of course, the original Joker, Cesar Romano. But, today of all days, there can only be one Caesar for us to celebrate!

Happy Ides of March everyone!

25
Jun
2019

Use By: Watermelon and Feta Salad

categories: Feta, Fruit, Salad, Use By, Watermelon

To me, watermelon is an icon of summer and happiness. And I love feta cheese. So I am unsure why I was initially so resistant to the idea of a watermelon and feta salad. But the minute I tried it, I realised how wrong I had been. It is DELICIOUS!!!! And a really good way to use up a little bit of watermelon you may have left in your fridge.

It is winter and dark and grey here in Melbourne at the moment so this salad is a mere memory of sunshine. However, for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, I hope this becomes as much a staple on your summer table as it is now on mine!

Before we even get onto the taste, let’s talk about how my Watermelon and Feta salad looks!.

It is such a lovely contrast of colours – the deep pink of the watermelon against the white of the feta, the deep blackish purple of the olives, the lighter purple of the onions and the bright green of the leaves.

And as for the taste? It will get your tastebuds dancing lust ike this!

The girl in the white mini dress is the watermelon…it’s the first thing you notice and she’s bringing the sweetness.

The girl in the leafy bikini is the feta. Also up front but bringing a bit more complexity by adding some salty creaminess to the mix.

Blue Speedo guy is the red onion. He’s adding some pow!

Sitting down girl is the olives – she’s bringing some more salt and a briny oiliness and somehow keeping all the others on beat.

White bikini in the background? She’s the leaves – she’s bascially a supporting player for the front four

And finally, orange Speedo’s? He’s the sprinkle of fresh dill and chilli flakes….not noticeable all the time…but when you do…it’s memorable!

Add them all together and you’ve got a party just ready to happen!

This is a fun salad and if you aren’t into the beach party breakdown I have given you, look at some other ways people have had fun with it:

Rubik’s Cube Salad (via Cityline TV)

Watermelon Cups (via Clean Food Crush)

And my favourite, just because it is so pretty! Watermelon Stars (via Taste.com.au)

This starry version will be part of Christmas lunch this year for sure!

My recipe is fairly loose, depending on what I have on hand. Check out any of the recipes above for an exact version.

But don’t forget to add the olives. None of the other recipes include them and believe me, they bring it!!!

Have a fabulous week!

03
Apr
2019

Use By: Pesto Potato Salad

categories: 1980's Food, Pesto, Potato Salad, Use By

What did people eat before the pesto boom of the ’80’s? I love pesto and eat it by the bucketful but I always seem to end up with a bit left in the jar that is not enough for a batch of pasta. Well, this Pesto Potato Salad is one of my favourite ways of using up that annoying last bit. It’s also good for using up some of those veggies you have sitting in the bottom of your fridge.

I used radishes, edamame and red onion in mine. You could use beans, peas, tomatoes, zucchini whatever you have in the house or your favourite veggies.

The idea behind this is that you use what is left in the jar to make the dressing. Add some oil and lemon juice into your jar of pesto, close it up tight and give it a good shake.

Taste – add salt, pepper, some chilli flakes, maybe a little more garlic if you like. I added some extra parmesan cheese to really ramp up some of those pesto flavours.

Shake again and pour over freshly boiled potatoes while they are still warm. This will allow the flavour to really infuse into the potatoes as they cool. Cos no one likes a bland potato salad!

You can make it up to this point in the morning or even the day before you are planning to have the salad. Just pop the potatoes and dressing into the fridge until you are almost ready to serve.

At that time, remove from the fridge, stir through the rest of your veggies, throw in some toasted pine nuts and, some finely chopped basil leaves (I didn’t have basil and felt it would be against the spirit of a Use By Post to buy some just for the Pesto Potato Salad so mine is garnished with chives).

This salad is great with BBQ’s, seafood, chicken, anywhere you would have regular potato salad but maybe want to shake things up a bit. I could eat potato salad every day of the week so something a bit different from the classic mayo-based salad (but for a great one of them, see here) makes a refreshing change.

Here’s the recipe.

Pesto Potato Salad

Print Recipe

A delicious and versatile potato salad

Author: Taryn Fryer

Ingredients

Scale

4 medium potatoes, diced
1/2 cup edamame
1/2 red onion, diced
4 radishes, sliced
1/4 cup pine nuts, toasted
1 tbsp Parmesan cheese
Basil leaves, chives to garnish
Dressing!
1 jar of bought pesto with around 1 tbsp of pesto left in the bottom
3 tbsp olive oil
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1 clove of finely chopped garlic (optional)
A sprinkle of chilli flakes (optional)
Salt and Pepper to Taste

Cook Mode Prevent your screen from going dark

Instructions

Dressing!
Place all the ingredients in the jar of pesto, seal and shake well until mixed.
Boil the potatoes until just tender
Pour the dressing over the top.
Just before serving mix through the remaining vegetables and pine nuts.
Top with the herbs.
Enjoy!

Notes

Feel free to add whatever cooked or raw vegetables you have into this salad!

Pesto, may well be the quiche of the ’80’s but it also makes a damn fine potato salad!

Have a great week!

13
Jan
2019

This could get meze: Hummus and Tabbouleh

categories: 1970's food, 1970's recipes, Dip, Good Housekeeping World Cookery, Lebanon, Middle Eastern, Salad, Vegan, World Cooking

I LOVE Middle Eastern food. One of my favourite cookbooks is Persiana by Sabrina Ghayour and I also love all the Ottolenghi books. Maha in Melbourne is one of my favourite restaurants – their 12-hour slow cooked lamb is to die for! I also used to live in an area of Melbourne that is full of middle eastern restaurants and ate at one of them at least once a week. So I was very excited to see that the next chapter in Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery (1972) was for food from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. I was even more excited to see that there were recipes for two absolute classics of the region – hummus and tabbouleh. Both of which were in the Lebanese section.

Apart from the deliciousness, one of the other reasons I love Middle Eastern food is the amazing names for example, The Imam Fainted, and The Dervish’s Rosary. No other culture that I can think of has such poetic names for their food. My original plan had been to feature both of these recipes however, I recently discovered that I have an allergy to eggplant (aubergine), an ingredient that features heavily in both of these dishes.

Have you ever wondered if what you see and call “green” is the same as what other people see when they see green? Yes, it’s the colour of grass and leaves and apples but is the green I see the same as the green you see?

I wonder about things like that all the time.

I’m super fun at parties…

Well, my experience with eggplant was a little like finding out that what I call green is what everyone else calls pink. I was talking to a friend of mine about eggplants (as you do) and happened to mention “I like the way they make your mouth go all tingly”.

My friend was like “No…no it doesn’t….” with this face:

Long story short, it turns out that not everyone’s mouth tingles when they eat eggplant and that tingle is actually an allergic reaction. Turns out I am mildly allergic to nightshades, particularly eggplant and capsicums.

So an eggplant heavy menu was off the menu. So, no great names today, just some damn nice food. Starting with…

Hummus

Luckily I have no allergy problems with hummus which is wonderful because I eat it by the truckload. And yet, I have never made it before. And I may never make it again. I’d read that for really smooth hummus you need to peel the chickpeas. This is not only utterly boring (even using the hacks that abound on the interwebs) but also oddly repulsive. The chickpea peels kept sticking to my fingers and pulling them off felt weirdly like removing my own skin. It even looked a bit like it too…

The hummus was lovely though. This was a very classic recipe but, you could jazz it up by adding herbs or other flavourings to it.

Here are twenty or so variations from my Appetizers spreadsheet:

You say Tabbouleh, I say Tabouli

For the love of Mike can we settle on one spelling and stick to it? I’ve seen this spelt so many different ways – Tabbouleh, Tabouleh, Tabouli, Tabbouli…..in the end, even Good Housekeeping gave up. They list this in the index as Mint and Parsley Salad!

Unlike hummus, which I buy pretty much every week, I never buy tabbouleh. Because store-bought tabbouleh is generally disgusting – soggy and bland.

Homemade? Delish!

Like the hummus, the tabbouleh recipe in World Cookery is fairly plain. But this will allow you to jazz it up as you wish. Next time, I will add a little sumac into the dressing to ramp up the zing factor. I am also very taken with the Ottolenghi idea of topping tabbouleh with pomegranate arils.

That variation and a number of others can be found here.

The Recipes

I used tinned chickpeas for my recipe. I also assumed that when they said sesame oil in the recipe for hummus that they meant tahini (given it is in the recipe title) and not the sesame oil you use in Asian dishes.

Also, I did not garnish with parsley as per the suggestion because I needed all my parsley for the tabbouleh. I used a sprinkle of paprika.

The tabbouleh recipe suggests that you eat your tabbouleh using lettuce, vine or cabbage leaves as scoops. I prefer pita as the scoop, and if that piece of pita happens to have a smear of hummus on it, so much the better!

You could add some other delicious Middle Eastern titbits (for inspiration see here) and make up a lovely meze platter with these. Or, you could do what I did and just have them, along with the pita bread for lunch.

For those who care about such things, this meal is vegan.

Have a wonderful week! But before we go, tell me, what is your favourite cuisine?

05
Oct
2018

Time Poor Plum Salad and A Supposedly Fun Thing….

categories: Blue Cheese, Pistachio, Plums, Prosciutto, Salad

Hello, people of the world!

I’m back from my travels through England, France, and Russia…actually I’ve been back nearly four weeks now but things being…well things…have not had the time to put virtual pen to paper to blog. Until now.

Why? Well, first up there was a double whammy of jetlag (landing late on Friday night) and starting a new job (Monday morning). One of those things is exhausting. Both in four days is utterly overwhelming. I spent at least the first ten days in a head-spinning daze and utter exhaustion

Then the last two weeks I have been hitting the gym pretty hard. You know what Charles De Gaulle said about France being a nation of 246 kinds of cheese? Well, I think I tasted every single one of them. With wine to match…and, as a result, I came home a little….ummm….shall we say rounder than when I left? So more exhaustion but of the physical, not the mental kind this time. So, it has felt that there was just no time to write.

But then today I had a revelation ….I could write at lunchtime! So I packed my notebook in my bag and walked down to the riverside to write. I decided the river was the best place because where I work now is kind of a tourist area and you can never find a place to sit in the food court. And I to am too stingy to buy my lunch every day and hence be able to sit in a café to write. So down to the river it was!

We’ll come back to that but whilst we’re talking about being time poor, I thought I would share one of my favourite meals that takes less than ten minutes to prepare. In summer, I eat this, or a version of it at least once a week after the gym.

The ingredients are inspired by a very cute appetizer I read about in a magazine where you wrap slices of plum and slivers of blue cheese in strips of prosciutto. But when we need a meal on the table in under ten, there’s no time for the niceties of wrapping. We’re going to dump some lettuce on a plate (I used rocket, or arugula to my American friends) then add some slices of prosciutto, some slices of plum, some chunks of blue cheese and some pistachios. Dress with a drizzle of oil and balsamic vinegar.

So, my dance class runs from 8 pm to 9 pm, by the time I get home and into the kitchen it’s usually about ten past nine….and voila…here is a salad made and ready to eat by around 18 minutes past. It’s fast, it’s pretty to look and healthy to eat…well-ish.

There’s no real recipe – use whatever greens and cold meat you have. You can sub in peaches or apricots for the plums, goat’s cheese or any other soft cheese for the gorgonzola, and your favourite nuts for the pistachios.

So, let’s head back down to the river to see how the al fresco writing went. It must have been a success because you’re reading this now right?

Well…it was a gorgeous day and so pretty down there. It was exciting. I could be like the impressionist painters who sought inspiration “en plein air”. And I finally I could get some words out. So I wrote a bit. Ate my lunch. Then I got a bit distracted by all the people jogging or running along the path and wondered if maybe that’s what I should be doing. The short answer to that is no. Because not only do I sweat like a maniac when I run but my face goes bright red for about two hours after. I could shower to get rid of the one but there is no getting over that red face. And it’s a new job. I don’t want to be known as the tomato face girl. Then I realised I was there to write, not to get distracted by people going by.

But first, I had to move because I was being attacked by ants.

So I moved. Wrote a bit more. Ate a bit more. Thought about how coincidental it was that I was writing about a salad I make when I am time poor at a time when I was time poor and had to sit by the river to write at lunchtime.

Then I had to move again because a very aggressive seagull kept trying to steal my lunch. It was some leftover turkey meatballs and salad. I don’t think seagulls should be so keen to eat turkey. It’s kind of cannibalism. If I didn’t already hate them, that would have turned me against them. Plus I once saw them trying to attack ducklings at the lake near my house. They are the worst.

So. Third location lucky right? Wrong. I had barely sat down when I put my hand in something that…I really want to say it was a piece of rotten fruit. And you know it’s bad when that’s the best case scenario. I think it was far more likely to be something that a seagull or duck had left behind. Thank goodness I never go anywhere without a handy supply of anti-bac and tissues…

And there ended the great “Let’s see if we can write outdoors” experiment of 2018. Epic fail.

On the upside, on the way back from the river I spotted a far-flung corner of the food court that looked relatively empty. ‘Til next week.

Enjoy the salad!

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