Tag: Salad

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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21
Jul
2017

Cattle Country Salad for Cowboy Day

categories: 1970's food, Cook A Long, Cowboy Day, Meat, Salad, Salads For All Season

Go west they said. I took their advice and not only went west but a whole heap north as well to end up in the UK for this year’s Cowboy Day. I will be spending the actual day in the most haunted town in Britain! Maybe a ghost cowboy just like this one will appear on the day….

Spooky huh?

Something that is not at all spooky is the Cattle Country Beef Salad Salad l made to celebrate Cowboy day. But first, this is the first time I am writing, editing, and posting entirely via phone so let’s put any weirdness in this post, beyond the regular weirdness down to that and I will re-edit, format as required once I get home!

We don’t have cowboys in Australia. We have cattlemen. Who live in cattle country which is where this salad comes from. Actually, it comes from Rosemary Mayne-Wilson’s Salads for All Seasons but you know what I mean.

So what all goes into a Cattle Country Beef Salad?

Beef of course. I suspect originally this would have been leftovers from the Sunday roast but I just bought from slices of roast beef from the supermarket.
Then there’s apples. Because we all know one a day keeps the doctor away and you don’t want to get sick while you’re out riding the range.
There’s celery because…I dunno. What use is celery? I like the taste of it but….oh that’s right. Celery keeps the cattlemen skinny. Because no one likes a tubby cowboy. Specially the horses they ride around on all day.
Spring onions. To put a spring in their step.

That was about it for the original ingredients. I also added some mixed leaves because I had to use them before I left for the UK the following morning. I also added some chunks of a lovely vintage cheddar. Which also had to be used but cheese also makes anything taste better and this was no exception.

RMW suggests using a French dressing for this. Make it really punchy by being HEAVY on the mustard. The flavours in here are strong enough to deal with it.

This was yummy!!!! Quick simple delicious. That’s an all round winner for me!

Here’s the original recipe:

Okay, I’m trying to keep this short and sweet because posting off the phone is doing my head in.

Many thanks to Greg from Recipes for Rebels for inviting me to participate in the cookalong again this year. It is always a so much fun to be a part of something like this. Plus, he”s one of the most awesome people on the internet so should just be thanked in general

I dont have my regular sign off this week but just look what can happen when bloggers get together. For an explanation of why Battenberg Belle, Jenny Hammerton and I are wearing cowboy hats and clutching a meat cleaver, a melon baller and a hammer respectively, you’ll need to head over to Silver Screen Suppers but in the meantime, have a great Cowboy Day everyone!

15
Jul
2016

Cowboys, Caviar, Casseroles and Cocktails

categories: Cheese, Chilli, Chocolate, Cocktail, Corn, Eggs, Kahlua, Salad, Vodka

Dear readers

I had such high hopes for this post. Then they were totally dashed by a twist of fate that…well…I guess if I’d seen it coming it wouldn’t be a twist would it? But I’m jumping ahead of myself. First, I was totally delighted when Greg from Recipes4Rebels asked if I would join in a cookalong for Cowboy Day! This event occurs on the fourth Saturday of July each year and is celebrated all over the world!

Obviously, this is not the fourth Saturday in July, however, as I will be sunning myself on the beach at Sanur in Bali that day, with Greg’s blessing I am posting my ventures into Cowboy Cookin’ early! And it’s a three course meal y’all. (Because 1 that’s how cowboy’s talk and 2 cocktails are a course aren’t they? This one is almost a meal! But again, getting ahead of myself!)

So now onto my foiled grand plans. My idea was that I would find a cocktail called a Bali Cowboy – possibly a more tropical version of this cowboy cocktail and I would make it for my post and then, on the day itself, I would tweet another picture of me in Bali with with my Bali Cowboy and it would in a glass as big as my head and it would be blue and loaded with umbrellas and pineapple wedges and all the other tropical cocktail paraphenalia.

A quick google soon showed me that there is such a thing as a Bali Cowboy. It is NOT a cocktail. Turns out that a Bali Cowboy is a male prostitute who hangs around Kuta Beach willing to sell his services to any rich (ie all) Western women who care to pay for them. So, whilst I’m not 100% ruling out a photo of me with a Bali Cowboy on Cowboy Day, the likelihood of it happening has dropped significantly!

So, new ideas had to be found. Starting with some caviar. Because we’re classy cowboys! It’s Cowboy Caviar of courseWhere has this salad / dip been all my life? If this is what cowboys eat, then I want to be a cowboy. It’s all kinds of beans and corn and tomatoes and avocado . Truly delicious! I loved this!

So, for the second course, I went straight to the top. And by that I mean Mr John Wayne himself.

Turns out The Duke and I share a love of eggs, cheese and chillies. Now, just one thing about the John Wayne casserole…. To my mind, when you combine egg yolks to beaten egg whites with other stuff, in this instance cheese and chilli and you them put that in an oven and cook until it’s all puffed up and golden, that’s not so much a casserole as a soufflé.

You be the judge:

I’ll sit quietly over here and let my case speak for itself.

By the way, cooking this for an hour would be way too much. You are seeing about 35 minutes and I think it was over. I would cook this…half an hour max. Also, the tomato didn’t do much. I would actually leave it out and cook this for 20 minutes total.

The ~~soufflé~~ casserole was good but I think I was so blown away by the Cowboy Caviar that it kind of paled by comparison. I will definitely make it again though!

And now for my grand Cowboy finale, I am turning to to person who started all of this, yep, Greg. This cocktail /dessert is A-MAZING! So, so good. Cowboys and cowgirls, can I present, the Giant Martini!

There is no other word for this but absolutely divine! The giant in the Giant Martini doesn’t refer t to it’s size (but you could scale it up very easily) but to the fact that it was created on the set of Giant by Liz Taylor and Rock Hudson.

Git along little doggie, this cocktail is all mine!

And you too!

Ah yes, Greg’s site on the PC, a cocktail in front of me and The A-Z of Cooking behind it. Just a regular day round these parts!

Many, many thanks to Greg, this was so much fun! Thank you so much for including me! I always say this but you hear so much about the internet being a a horrible vicious place, I am always delighted and totally honoured to make new friends, like Greg, on here.

Ok, I’ve gotta go, 5:30am start tomorrow! But I’m loving and leaving you with some some super rhinestone cowboy singing!

Find out all about the Cowboy Day Cook A Long here. Hopefully my attempts will inspire you to bigger and better things on the day!

The recipe for Cowboy Caviar I used came from Cookie and Kate.

The Giant Martini recipe is here.

Kiss me and smile for me, I’ll be back here in a couple of weeks but if you can’t smile without me, I’ll be tweeting and instagramming from Bali throughout.

Loving you, leaving you, now!

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06
Sep
2015

Oeufs A La Cantalienne & Greens with Horseradish Dressing

categories: Eggs, France, Salad, Salad Dressing

What do you do when, you are about 30 seconds away from your front door and realise that you have left two essential ingredients for your planned dinner in the fridge at work?

First, swear.

A lot.

Then drum up an emergency supper of Oeufs a La Cantilienne and serve that with a Salad of Bitter Greens with Horseradish Dressing!

Happy days!

How eight hours can change you. I started the day off being super organised! For dinner, I had planned to celebrate Meatless Monday by making the cauliflower and chickpea “meat” balls from the Meatball book which is our latest selection from the Tasty Reads book club. I’d read the recipe that morning and realised I was short a few ingredients – namely basil and parsley for the green sauce which was going to accompany the meatballs.

I had tasted this green sauce on a visit to the Meatball and Wine Bar and it is SENSATIONAL. As far as I was concerned, no green sauce, no non-meatballs. You can kind of see the sauce in this picture. The man in the street looks pretty taken by them too!

But I digress. We’ll get to the meatball book in due course. Today is all about the eggs. And the cheese and the horseradish dressing.

Anyway, back to my super-organised morning, I was early that day so I stopped in at the supermarket beside the station and bought my herbs. And stored them in the work fridge for the day.

Where they stayed.

What to do? I wasn’t going back to get them. So, another dinner needed to be pulled out of the ingredients I had in the fridge and the pantry.

Now I ‘m going to let you in on a secret. I actually had the ingredients for a very posh and trés français version of the Oeufs a La Cantalienne. Because I plan my food within an inch of my life it was on my menu plan for later in the week. But you could also make a perfectly delicious version of this from ingredients you are likely to have in your fridge. It’s a great emergency meal!

So what are Oeufs a La Cantalienne? It’s a French Baked Cheesy Eggs. The version I was going to make had duck eggs, comté cheese and créme fraiche. But it would be equally delish with normal eggs, cheddar or swiss (gruyere) cheese and cream or sour cream. Of course the flavour will be slightly different with each variation but hey, it will all be good!!!

What’s more, these will be on the table in about 20 minutes. Just enough time for you to pour yourself a glass of vino and make your Bitter Greens Salad with Horseradish Dressing.

And you know. Eggs, cheese and cream. That’s never going to be bad. About 12 minutes in the oven is about perfect. I got a bit distracted by ~~a reality cooking show on the telly~~ something really important and end up cooking mine for about a quarter of an hour but in another plus, this recipe is pretty forgiving!

The bitter green salad with horseradish salad is a perfect accompaniment to this. I used rocket (arugula), kale, spinach and radicchio in mine but whatever greens you have in your fridge will be fine. This is not a meal to be too precious about!

The horseradish dressing is….OMG…just make it. Make it now!!! So good. So, so good. I have made this salad, or versions of it about a million times since – with eggs, avocado, steamed beans and broccoli, grilled salmon…and everytime it has been amazing. It’s my new favourite thing.

And, in a reversal of the initial dilemma of leaving things at work, there was a morning when when I got to work and realised I had left the horseradish dressing for my salad in the fridge at home. Well, there was no eating the salad without the dressing, I kept it in the fridge, bought my lunch and brought the dressing in the next day! That’s how good this dressing is. If it wasn’t totally unseemly, I would be licking it off the spoon. (I totally did that when no one was looking).

Oh, and when I finally made the non-meatballs? Total let down. The green sauce was pretty good but the balls were like the worst falafel I’ve ever eaten.

I should have just made more eggs!

Oeufs A La Cantalienne And Bitter Greens With Horseradish Dressing

Print Recipe

A great emergency supper. The Oeufs A La Cantalienne can be made as fancy or as simple as you like and the salad has quickly become a firm favourite!

Author: Taryn Fryer

Ingredients

Scale

For the Oeufs A La Cantalienne

2 duck eggs //eggs
30g Comté cheese//sharp cheddar//gruyere
1 tbsp crème fraiche //sour cream //cream
pinch of nutmeg (optional)
For the Bitter Greens Salad
2 tbsp mixed toasted seeds – I used pepitas, sunflower seeds and flax seeds
2 cups bitter greens – I used rocket (arugula), kale, spinach and radicchio
1/2 red onion thinly sliced

For the Dressing

3 tbsp creme fraiche
2 tbsp fresh grated horseradish or 1 tbsp prepared horseradish
1 tbsp champagne or white wine vinegar

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Instructions

For the Ouefs A La Cantalienne

Preheat oven to 220°C.
Grate the cheese and scatter half over the base of a buttered individual baking dish.
Separate the eggs, keeping yolks intact.
Whisk whites to soft peaks. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg.
Fold in the remaining cheese.
Pour mixture into the baking dishes and make an indentation in the middle of mixture.
Place an egg yolk in each indentation.
Add a 1/2 tbsp of crème fraiche by the side of each yolk.
Bake for 10 minutes or until golden and set.

For the Salad

Toss the greens and onion together.
Whisk the crème fraiche, horseradish and vinegar together until smooth.
Just before serving, toss through the greens and onion.
Top with the toasted seeds.

Notes

The dressing will make much more than you need for one salad. You’ll want to use the extra on everything you eat over the next week!
If you are making this for more than 2 people you can cook it in one large baking dish, you might just have to adjust the cooking time to be a bit longer.

Nutrition

Serving Size: 2

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