Tag: Salad

02
May
2020

10-Minute Autumn Salad

categories: Chestnuts, Salad, Vegetables

Autumn is truly here. Most days are bright and sunny days but with a little chill in the air to let you know that winter is on its way. The nights are getting cold and darkness is falling a little bit earlier each day. It is very pretty when I am out on my daily walk with the dogs. And it is perfect weather for an Autumnal Salad.

Autumn salad not only makes the use of one of my favourite autumn ingredients, chestnuts but the colours of the dish are meant to resemble the colours of autumn.

One of the paradoxes of living in iso is that, just when I have more time to cook, half the time I can’t be bothered. I feel like I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel anxious or scared. And whilst I am trying to enjoy the pleasures of the little things such as the turning of the leaves, TBH, a lot of the time I just want to sleep and/or play mindless games on my phone. Another weird thing is that I am sleeping more than ever but constantly feel tired.

Anyway, for the days when I am feeling blah, this salad is a lifesaver. Not only does it only take around ten minutes to prepare but Autumn Salad looks so colourful and pretty, is healthy and can be varied to fit what you have in the fridge or what you feel like eating on the day!

Back in the days before the ‘rona I used to regularly stock up on little vacuum packets of roasted chestnuts from the Japanese department store Daiso. I usually have a few of these in my pantry to make this salad and other things requiring chestnuts. I used my last pack to make this one so, for future rounds, it looks like I will be roasting my own chestnuts! Good thing they are in season! This will take this recipe out of the 10-minute realm but it will be worth it!

The Recipe

The original recipe for the Autumn Salad comes from the May 2003 Delicious magazine. The basic recipe is this:

However, the joy of this salad lies in the variations.

Make it vegetarian

Substitute the Proscuitto for Blue Cheese (This is my favourite).
Throw in some chopped up pears if you like. Fresh or dried, both a great!

Make it vegan

Substitute the Proscuitto for Roast Pumpkin or Sweet Potato

You can serve this Autumn Salad on its own or for a larger meal, it is fabulous with a baked potato, loaded with butter and chives,

That’s me done for today. Stay safe!

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!

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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18
Jun
2018

Cevapcici with Sopska Salata and Random Facts about David Bowie

categories: Salad, Sausage, Serbia, World Cooking

Поздрав из Србије!

Or, to my non-Serbian friends, Greetings from Serbia. Today we are continuing to explore the former Yugoslavian regions with a side step from Croatia to Serbia.

On the menu today are Cevapcici (aka Cevapi) which are sausages found all over the Balkans in various shapes, sizes and flavours. The word is derived from the Turkish kebab from which my serving suggestion today is also derived.

Because meat+bread+salad = delicious in any language! 😘

Wikipedia lists the following variations:

Sarajevski ćevap, from Sarajevo, Bosnia, meat mix of beef and sheepmeat
Travnički ćevapi, from Travnik, Bosnia, meat mix of beef, veal, mutton and lamb
Banjalučki ćevapi, from Banja Luka, Bosnia, beef meat
Tuzlanski ćevapi, from Tuzla, Bosnia, meat mix of beef, mutton and lamb
Novopazarski ćevap, from Novi Pazar, Serbia, traditionally sheepmeat
Leskovački ćevap, from Leskovac, Serbia, veal meat

My version uses lamb so takes its cues from a the novopazarski cevap. I could not find a recipe for one of these online and the entry in Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery was vague to say the least:

So I used a lamb cevapcici recipe I found online here. The spice blend made these sausages super tasty and the high-fat content of the lamb kept the sausages from drying out during cooking so this was a really good find. Also, the cevapcici were super easy to make.

The recipe for the Sopska Salata or Serbian Tomato Salad came from here.

My pita recipe came from the Relish Mama Family cookbook which is our current Tasty Reads cookbook but you could use any homemade pita recipe or use bought flatbreads to make cooking this even easier.

And now for some fun facts about Serbia. Which turned into random facts about David Bowie.

Nikola Tesla was a Serb. Amongst other things, Tesla is known for the development of alternating current and wireless technology. He was also played by David Bowie in the amazing movie The Prestige!

The most known Serbian word?

Vampire.

David Bowie starred alongside Susan Sarandon in a vampire film back in the 1980’s called The Hunger.

Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie in the Tony Scott movie “The Hunger”… (1983)
byu/Reporter_at_large inDavidBowie

Serbia is the world’s largest exporter of a particular (and delicious) food item. In 2012, 95% of this item came from Serbia. And seeing as this has now also become an unofficial David Bowie post, it features as an ingredient in two of the cocktails on this list inspired by David Bowie.

The ingredient? Raspberries.

One more….just to really tie things together…Brian Rasic (Brajan Rašić) who was Bowie’s official photographer for many years and gave the world several iconic photos of the great man? Was born in Belgrade.

Seriously, sometimes this just writes itself….

Have a wonderful week everyone!

And tell me, if you were going to drink a David Bowie-inspired cocktail from the list above, which would you choose? I’d have a Starman.

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Cevapcici Recipe:

Sopska Salata Recipe (SBS Food)

05
Sep
2017

Tiny Waldorf Salads

categories: Apples, Celery, Grapes, Salad, United States of America, Walnuts

Is there a salad both more famous (and more mangled) than the Waldorf Salad? I doubt it. And because, pretty much since it’s inception, people have been mucking around with it, I thought I would put my stamp on it. As I have a predilection for little food, I shrank my Waldorf Salad into individual serving sizes.

Waldorf Salad – History

The Waldorf Salad was first made at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1896 and was, a huge success. The original recipe only contained apples, celery and mayonnaise The grapes and walnuts came later but are now considered integral ingredients.

The Waldorf precedes the other classic “American” salad, the Caesar, by 28 years.

The Waldorf Salad was also immortalised in an episode of Fawlty Towers. I wonder if this is the only salad to ever have a sit com episode named after it. If you have not seen this you must. It is hilarious. But here’s a taste!

So, celery, apples, walnuts grapes…in a mayonnaise sauce. Which is pretty much what mine consisted of.

So how did they manage to get it so wrong in the ’60’s?

Well, the top three reasons of what went wrong in the 60’s in general are:

Charlie Manson
Massive amounts of drug taking
Gelatine

Now,Manson may be all kinds of crazy but I don’t think we can blame him for this:

Retro Waldorf via Bon Appetit Or this (even though this is kind of pretty)

Or, Good Lord, even this:

Nope, the blame for that lies squarely with 3). Possibly with a large dose of 2) thrown in

After those horrors i totally understand why the poor old Waldorf Salad is not nearly as popular today as the Caesar salad. The graphs below show internet interest in the words as search terms.

Kind of makes me wonder why I am bothering to post on Waldorf when it’s so unpopular. Next week – Caesar Salad! And hit city!

The thing is, Caesar salad is often awful and the Waldorf salad tasted good. It’s crunchy and crisp and sweet and nutty. Nothing wrong there. The buttermilk dressing I used adds a little tang without being too cloying. It’s delicious. And easy to make. And healthy. And it’s fun to wrap up the main ingredients in a lettuce leaf like a salady sang choy bau.

What more do you need?

Go and make one now. You already know how….it’s celery, apples, walnuts grapes…in a mayonnaise sauce.

Pop it all into a lettuce leaf, wrap it up and enjoy!

[yumprint-recipe id=’98’] Have a wonderful week!

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