Vegetables

Salad Class: How to Up Your Game in 3 Easy Ways — Part 2, SEASONINGS

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Recipe and post here for GRILLED ZUCCHINI AND CORN SALAD (another colorful mixture of cooked and fresh veggies with fresh herbs)

Readers’ Note: This is the 2nd and middle segment (SEASONINGS) of a three-part blog cooking class about making your salad a better place to eat!  Click on the red links below to read the other two posts and come chopping with me to make your newest stellar salad. While this class is pretty much do-it-yourself, I welcome comments, emails, photos, etc., to keep us in closer touch — even when we’re all in our own kitchens. Salad on, my friends.

“No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.” 

― Laurie Colwin

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SALAD CLASS…How to Up Your Game in Easy Ways — SUBSTANCE, SEASONING, AND STYLE. Part 1: Substance

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Mixed cooked/fresh ingredients give your mouth a break from chewing + create the interest your eye and stomach crave.

Every year about this time, there’s a flurry of interest in fresh and easy meals — which translates to, “Let’s just have a salad.” (It happens on January 2, too!) I’m all for that, but I’d skip the word, “just,” and shout out, “SALAD!” Out of all the cooking classes I’ve taught over the last 12 years, there are the most questions about salads: what goes in them, how to make a vinaigrette, what kind of oil to buy, the sort of salt I like, and how to make salad a meal. In fact, I taught a two-hour class about making salad a couple of years ago and the fun we had together still resonates whenever I think about it. Folks want a great salad; they want easy and fresh, healthful meals, but they’re often a bit stuck in their I-buy-this-every-week greens and goodies. This summer, I decided it’s time to organize an online lesson on salad savvy and give you the skinny on how to bring it all together. As the information I wanted to share was entirely too much for one blog post, I’ve divided it into three (simultaneously published) posts so that you can read them all in a row if you like–or not– and then it’s off to the farmer’s market, the deck, the store, or backyard garden for you to get started! Click on the red links below and come chopping with me to make your newest stellar salad!

  • SUBSTANCE — Part 1 (This post–all about ingredients.)
  • SEASONINGS — Part 2 (Next post on blog–spices, herbs, oil, vinegar, dressings, balance, etc. )
  • STYLE! — Part 3 (The last post in a row of the 3 — what makes you say, “Wow, that looks good!”)

While this class is pretty much do-it-yourself, I welcome comments, emails, photos, etc., to keep us in closer touch — even when we’re all in our own kitchens!

“No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.” 

― Laurie Colwin
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It’s Too Hot to Cook. So Don’t. (plus what I’m missing/not missing)

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just add #rosé or a cold beer

CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM LEFT CORNER: Kalamata olives, hummus, potato chips, tortilla chips, sliced cucumbers, Triscuit Thin Crisps, sweet cherries, Green Chile-Pimento cheese, baby carrots, cherry tomatoes, guacamole, and onion dip.

Americans, in the heavy heat of summer, are known for flocking to cold-cold air-conditioned restaurants for dinner–and staying a while. Maybe a long while. (Like until it cools off at home.) I mean, who’s going to turn that stove on when it’s that warm? Even if you have AC (and a lot of Americans do), it makes no sense to make that blessed machine work any harder now, does it? In Covid-Time, though, quite a few of us are still not going to restaurants–at least not to sit inside. We may do drive-throughs or pick-ups, but restaurant dining rooms are still kinda high up on the scale of risk factors. In some places, they’re closed again. Let’s face it, I’m thinking it almost sounds as if it’s not quite worth it, despite my desperately wanting to support my fave local eateries. And even if we do go, we can’t stay there; that’s only fair. There are fewer tables and, in restaurant parlance, “They need to turn.” In other words, you need to eat and git. Drink and run. Maybe, until a few more things move around, it’s still better to spend most dinnertimes at home. Yeah. As in the past four months.

Save Restaurants — read up here.

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Fast Teriyaki Salmon Bowl

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Serve with hot green tea.

Over the past five years, “bowls” have become a happily standard feature on American restaurant menus. Most feature some sort of grain (rice, quinoa, grits, barley), a well-seasoned protein, mixes of fresh and cooked vegetables, perky and tasty garnishes, and, of course, a stand out, distinctive sauce. While nearly anything goes into a bowl these days — including traditional Mediterranean or Mexican ingredients — I often find myself leaning toward the Asian-inspired varieties and am happiest if the cooks are fairly heavy-handed with the soy sauce, please.

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Lemon and Garlic Chicken with Parmesan Vegetables–How and Why to Roast a Whole Chicken at Home this Week!

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While chicken often tops the list of dinner ingredients in the U.S., (“Winner, winner, chicken dinner!” or “A chicken in every pot!”) it doesn’t take much to figure out those meals today are often based on ubiquitous, tasteless boneless chicken breasts instead of the flavorful cage-free chickens Herbert Hoover supposedly wanted for us. The American obsession with huge chicken breasts (hmph) is a sad one and continues for many reasons–one being it’s easy to not remember where meat comes from if you only have a slab of it and no fat, bones, joints, tendons, guts, or skin. I’ve had more than one adult student who, faced with putting a whole chicken (already cut up, by the way) in a skillet to brown for a tasty fricassée, admitted they had never before handled a chicken with bones. I, on the other hand, almost never buy boneless breasts, though I’ll admit I adore boneless thighs for everything from sandwiches to chili. There are several reasons–the main one being the taste factor–but here’s the critical other one. Because we demand outrageous and overwhelming numbers of inexpensive low-fat, protein rich boneless breasts (just try to buy bone-in breasts in today’s market) compared to other parts, chickens today are often–though not always– raised in incredibly poor and horrific conditions by inhumanely treated workers. How’d that come to be???

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Horseradish Pot Roast and Vegetables with Gravy + Vegetable-Beef Soup from the Leftovers

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There are no potatoes in this version, but add them if you like. I stuck with parsnips, turnips, carrots, onions, garlic, and Brussels sprouts.

Returning home from a week’s vacation is always a bit disconcerting. To begin with, there are the myriad elements of travel and all its interesting, but occasionally unsettling features…

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Zucchini–10 Years of Recipes from More Time at the Table

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Zucchini frittata with sautéed mushrooms

This post combines the current week’s tasty zucchini frittata, zucchini favorites from the past few years, and a zucchini roundup I did in 2014. Just below the frittata recipe are more recent recipes, which are followed by the original post including zucchini goodness 2009-2014. I’ve got them all here together now just to make things easier for you and for me! Enjoy.

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Perhaps you have too much zucchini in your garden … or your friends keep pawning it off on you. If so, this is a place for new ideas to freshen up your late summer table for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

Another zucchini frittata (for one) from summer, 2017. This one has tomatoes, too.
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FRIDAY FISH: Sole Arrabbiata with Vegetables

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Eight years ago, I blogged a dish I perhaps inadvisedly named, “Saving Your Sole in a Fish Bowl.” I guess I couldn’t help myself. Recently, looking over some of my earlier fish and seafood recipes, it was obvious this recipe –while tasty and a little different –needed updating. Not only did the recipe itself scream for a fresh edit, the photographs were sad. So sad. They didn’t even look like the delicious meal I had made and, well, they were pretty embarrassing. If I were going to use this for the last FRIDAY FISH of the year (Good Friday), I’d better get to work. More about Good Friday?

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Cauliflower-Ginger Soup

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I definitely got my love of soup from my dad, an inveterate soup maker, who would have turned 111 this past weekend were he still fishing on earth instead of on that perfect heavenly lake chock full of bass:

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above:  my proud dad in the same fishing outfit he wore for all the years I can remember

Soup is probably my most loved food if you haven’t yet figured that out. Right after pizza. Well, perhaps this is a difficult thing to discern. I could eat soup every day and sometimes do. While I lust after pizza–any kind except pineapple–I don’t think I could eat it every day.

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