Have a Salad Adventure

For many years, I never looked at cooking as an adventure, but thank goodness that changed. My husband’s love of food and talents as a cook excited me about food. Then the gift of my learning about Indian cuisine piqued my interest further in the art of melding ingredients into tasty delights. For some years now I’ve been enamored by the deli counter at Puget Sound Consumer Cooperatives (natural food stores through the Pacific Northwest). They do amazing things with salads. I’ve been known to reverse engineer several of their salads as the ingredients are on the labels. Then I discovered that they will kindly print out and provide a copy of a salad’s recipe upon request. The recipes are in amount that may yield 10 lbs. but, hey, I can do simple arithmetic.

Sometimes I wander over to the Fremont PCC and browse. They have the best buy on Patak’s Curry Paste, a staple for my Indian food adventures. Their vegetable department is beautiful and tempting. I particularly love the bulk food section. I’ve got recipes for salads that include unusual grains. When is the last time you made a salad with Faro? It’s a chewy form of wheat and makes for a great texture. I’ve learned to love Quinoa mixed together with a tangy Italian dressing I make, chopped cucumber and chopped tomatoes. 

The other day I needed a diversion so I wandered PCC. There in the deli counter was a new salad. I tasted it and loved it. It had some ingredients I didn’t own and for which I had no other recipes. I realized,  though, if I owned them I could remake this salad a number of times. It’s a Saturday morning, breakfast is completed and I indulged myself in concocting my new salad. I’m munching on it now. It’s as tasty as I remember and the first time I’ve created something including miso.

My new and tasty salad Sesame-Miso Cucumber Salad has toasted sesame seeds, miso, rice vinegar, honey, hot water, toasted sesame oil, and red pepper flakes blended together into which chunks of English cucumber is marinated.

So, the next time you are at PCC or another market with diverse and interesting salads in their deli, have fun, reverse engineer the salad, ask for the recipe (or check on the Internet) I found a version of the salad at this site: http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/sesame-miso-cucumber-salad-50400000111965/
so who knows from where it emerged. I used 1/4 cup sesame seeds, 1/4 cup miso, 2 Tablespoons of vinegar, honey, hot water and sesame oil and 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper.

Photo: John Autry; Styling: Cindy Barr

Arroz con Pollo...The Role of Savory Rice Dishes In Our Lives

Arroz con Pollo, a phrase I remember from high school Spanish class. Rice and Chicken came to mind this week. I have a jar of Classico Alfredo Sauce that I just discovered is one year beyond the expiration date, alas. Before I noticed that, it had inspired me to a dish that I’m planning to make for dinner making. I've decided to go ahead with my dish and make the Alfredo sauce from scratch. (I just looked up a simple recipe ¼ cup butter, 1 cup cream, 1 garlic clove and 1 ½ cup grated Gruyere cheese and parsley which I'm omitting.) Anyway, on with my dish, I’m boiling some rice, Basmati because I have it, and I’m crockpotting on a whole chicken seasoned with Johnny’s Seasoning to be ready in 6 hours. Toward evening I’ll sauté an onion and some celery, cut chunks of chicken and mix it into the onion and celery sautéing in butter, then I’ll mix together my Alfredo sauce, sautéed onion, celery and chicken, and the rice. It’ll be a basic savory chicken and rice dish, rare for me to make.

 

Savory rice dishes are anomaly amidst our favored cuisine. I can hook my husband with the Alfredo sauce (and some shredded, toasted Gruyere on top) but it’s an iffy dish for him. Why? Because neither of our mothers ever made a savory dish including rice. We both remember rice with milk, sugar and raisins and, once in a while, rice pudding. I've wondered why with all the casserole, gravy type dishes so popular in the 1950’s and 1960’s. We both wonder why our mothers had never discovered the meal-extending potentials of rice. Once for high school home economics class I remember making Spanish Rice. My adventure stood out in my mind so much because, first, I never cooked, and second, it was a savory rice dish.

So, high school came to mind on two accounts, Arroz con Pollo from Spanish class and my actually cooking something in the early years of my life.

My late found love of cooking documented in this blog is a testament to the inspiration of my husband who shared his love of food and cooking and to special friends from India who helped me think of food in terms of a cuisine and of cooking as interesting food adventures rather than merely having food for sustenance.
 

A Breakfast On The Boat

It’s a beautiful sunny day, the lake is blue and a peaceful smooth, a perfect day for my husband’s quintessentially favorite breakfast which he hasn’t had in a very long time - a veal chop, two four-minute poached eggs, toast and coffee. I happened to be perusing the meat department of Safeway when they were stocking the discounted section. There they were, two veal chops. (Ok, here’s the caveat, my husband is the biggest animal lover of all time having loved a menagerie of pets but it not a vegetarian. Whatever our meat politics, they were there and they would have gone to waste.)

This is how you pull off a perfect breakfast on a boat that allows only one electric appliance at a time. Coffee made, I crushed a couple of garlic cloves readied for the butter in which I would brown the chops.

I brought a small pan of water to a boil readying it for the eggs.

While it was coming to a boil, I lined a cup with plastic wrap, carefully broke an egg into it then gathered the top and secured with dental floss I keep in the kitchen for this purpose. I readied two eggs in this manner.

Turning the water off, I heated the frying pan. in the hot pan I melted a couple tablespoons of butter and added the garlic for a minute until it started to brown then spooned most of it out so as not to have burned garlic. Then, I seared the chops, browning them beautifully.

 Off went the burner, on went the toaster oven to 400 degrees and in went the chops to finish cooking. They didn’t take long to reach the desired temperature so carefully measured with my new digital meat thermometer. Off went the oven and on went the burner to bring the water back to a boil.

Into the quickly reboiled water went the carefully wrapped eggs. The timer on my cell phone set to four-minutes guaranteed perfectly poached eggs. When the bell rang, off went the burner and into the toaster oven went two slices of 15 grain toast.

I spooned the eggs carefully out of their wrapping and onto the plate next to the perfectly browned chops. The bread nicely toasted, I turned out a beautiful plate of a chop next to two perfectly poached eggs with toast and butter.

SHARED TRADITIONS

SHARED TRADITIONS

By Marilyn Michael

 

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My grandparent’s kitchen was the hub of their small house. Taking up a whole house end, it had an amazing-to-a-child trap door that led to a musty dirt-walled basement lined with shelves of canned peaches, and pears, dill pickles, apricot preserves and other assorted jellies and jams. The kitchen’s window looked out on a full city lot sized garden from which my Grandfather would emerge with corn to be husked, shiny fat pea pods to be shelled and other fresh food like my Grandmother’s favorite-turnip greens. By the time I was old enough to store memories, the wood and coal stove had given way to electric and the icebox was now a refrigerator, but my Grandmother still had eggs and cream delivered by a local farmer.

Every Christmas of my childhood was spent in this simple, inviting house in walking distance from my own. There were family traditions, often involving food. Christmas Eve was a buffet and always included my two favorite dishes, brown beans and ham bone and Grandma’s potato salad. We opened our presents that night and Christmas day was spent enjoying them and preparing a traditional feast of turkey, ham and all the trimmings.

One Christmas Eve tradition was a treat but always seemed a bit odd for my family. No one drank alcohol and milk was something had ice cold with a meal or plate of cookies. On that night every year, though, they made Tom and Jerry’s all around. A rare bottle of whiskey would appear for the adults and the kids would enjoy vanilla poured straight into the hot milk thickened with a powdered sugar and egg batter. A dusting of nutmeg gave it an exotic taste as it went down smooth and warm. I’d savor the smells of the nutmeg and vanilla and wonder why we had this yummy drink only once a year. It just didn’t occur to my family that the Christmas Eve tradition of this sweet, hot milk drink could be enjoyed at other times.

As an adult, I stayed close to middle class culinary roots and never tried hot milk drinks outside of a couple Christmas Eve attempts at Tom and Jerry’s. When coffee became a culture declaring basic drip passé, I began drinking mochas. The steaming hot milk and sweetness of chocolate brought memories of the creamy milk drink of my Christmas Eves. The presence of coffee, though, somehow made it different. But, it was comforting and exotic in a similar way. And, they even had freshly grated nutmeg on the counter.

When a new libation called Chai began appearing in coffee shops I never tried it. Not having been raised on tea, I had never developed a taste for it. I vaguely remember my Aunt Mame sipping tea from china cups, but she was an anomaly in my coffee-fanatic family. We had sturdy percolators that sat on stovetops with little glass toppers for a view of the perking brew. Dad had an odd-seeming habit from his farm family upbringing of sometimes adding a few eggshells in the coffee grounds to “take the bitterness out”. We were definitely coffee people. Even after retiring, my father kept the tradition of morning and afternoon coffee breaks, usually with a sweet treat, often pie.

As an adult, two women who had grown up in India became my close friends and offered to teach me to make some of their traditional dishes. Developing a taste for this cuisine opened my mind to food traditions other than the basic comfort foods of my youth. I was eager to try it all. I learned to make Tandoori marinades, vegetable dahls, meat and vegetable curries, rice-based pulaos, coconut sauces for fish, spicy chutneys and I discovered a store that made heavenly garlic Nan, a delicious flatbread to accompany the dishes.

One day a new friend from Pakistan shared that his favorite food memory was the Chai his mother would always have for them. He offered to make it for me. Though concerned the element of tea would preclude my enjoyment of this libation, I looked forward to trying it. He used loose black tea that came in half-inch strings, not the powder filled tea bags that characterized, for me, a cup of tea. Into the boiling water went the tea, and then brown sugar, whole cloves, chunks of cinnamon sticks, and small rounds of fresh ginger. When the milk and cardamom powder were added to the boiling aromatic brew, it foamed up impressively. Then, his Mom’s secret, several fifteen-second removals of the pot from the heat and reboiling.

The aromas grabbed me. This was clearly not the watery, tepid brown drink I thought of as tea. He strained it and poured me a steaming cup. I was in love. Cupping my hands around the mug I was transported to exotic lands and at the same time back to my Grandma’s kitchen on Christmas Eve. It was lightly sweet and creamy smooth. And, beyond the nutmeg and vanilla of my Tom and Jerry memories, its spice blend was exotic and yet comforting. How lucky he had been. He’d enjoyed this amazing treat year around. It was his favorite food memory; I’m sure in a similar way that I look back fondly on those Christmas Eve cups of hot sweet milk and nutmeg.

 

Sam Khurshid’s

Chai Recipe

Makes 5 cups

Ingredients:

3 cups water

2 cups milk

5 rounded teaspoons black tea (one per cup or

       1 tea bag per cup)

5 whole cloves (for ten cups he used 15,

       traditionally it’s two cloves per cup)

5  -  ½ cinnamon sticks (one per cup)

5 teaspoons brown sugar (one per cup) or to taste

5  - 1/4 inch thick slices of 1” round fresh ginger,    

       unpeeled (one per cup)

1/2 teaspoon cardamom powder (just 1/2 teaspoon

       for the entire batch.)

Instructions:

Bring water to a boil. Add black tea. cinnamon, brown sugar, cloves, and ginger. Boil for  2 minutes then add milk and cardamom. (It expands in pot, watch it.) Bring back to boil, take off heat for 15 seconds return it to heat and boil. Do this twice more. Strain off the spices and tea. Serve. (This can be made with equal parts water and milk or all milk.)

Turkey Day Treats 2012

I have a very interesting friend who loves to cook. She did an amazing take on Thanksgiving turkey this year. She took her inspiration from this site: The Runaway Spoon

And here is her finished product. She said the turkey was delicious and the white meat was unbelievably moist.

 

If you like to cook, this is a time to have fun. I am taking two dishes to Thanksgiving at sister-in-law's, the Wasabi Potato Salad, from an earlier post and a Maple Cranberry Wild Rice dish, the recipe for which the chef at the Puget Sound Consumer Coop Deli shared with me. Since it's not on their web sites recipes I'm not posting it but it involves two kinds of rice, cranberry relish (available in their deli), yam chunks roasted with thyme, toasted pecans, dried cranberries and a dressing involving pureed onion, maple syrup and cider vinegar. It's so tasty, you just keep munching on it. I have reverse engineered several of the PCC salads as the ingredients are listed next to them.

Marinated Cheese & Ah ha! Moments

It all started with a chunk of Mozzarella I'd bought to try individual pizzas on flour tortillas but never got around to. The Mozzarella needed using but I had just made a big pan of Macaroni and Cheese and didn't need more pasta dishes. I perused my Indian cookbooks for inspiration - no Mozzarella there. I grabbed a Vegetarian Sicilian cookbook (Strange, meat lovers that we are, that we have a vegetarian cookbook, but I did learn how to make good polenta from it.) A little Mozzarella in a salad there but not much else. Funny, I thought it was their cheese. Then I remembered how much I love the Caprese Salad with the marinated cheese balls and cherry tomatoes.

 

I hopped onto the Internet and found a balsamic and olive oil marinade. Up popped my oil conflict, I can never use olive oil fast enough to keep it from growing rancid. I called an experienced cook friend to discuss my olive oil problem and get her thoughts on bagging the olive oil for Canola and what she thought of the recipe I’d found. I suppose real Italians would cringe at my thought, but it’s that or rancid olive oil. Besides, I’m not really sure I’m really fond of fresh olive oil. Oh yes, I’ve eaten in those Italian restaurants where they serve a little dish of good olive oil in which to dip fresh bread chunks, it’s OK but when you’ve grown up with butter slathered on bread…. 

 

OK, back to my cheese chunk. It occurred to me that in the past I had marinated olives in Italian Dressing (which brought to mind an important Ah ha moment in my life). They were delicious, why not the cheese and tomatoes? In the past I used bottled Italian dressing. For several years now, I’ve made a homemade Tangy Italian Dressing (recipe in blog index) that we love. It has red wine vinegar and Canola oil. I am going to pick up some cherry tomatoes, but bag the fresh basil leaves (not sure I really like eating whole basil leaves. Basil is a whole other conundrum, always liked the idea of pesto, just don’t like it. I do believe if I set my mind to it I could develop a taste for it like I have the Indian spices. But I’m going to put aside that food adventure for now

Marinating cheese is a cool idea (and this is the first time I’ve tried it). The food concept is far away from my mother's imagination. Funny how different parts of the world come up with different food repertoires. I grew up in a middle class home with parents who worked blue-collar jobs. When I moved away as a young married, I began to meet people who lived different, and sometimes more sophisticated, realities.

 

At the home of one of these sophisticates was the very first time I encountered a marinated olive (probably just black olives in Italian dressing). Now, that may not seem so special, but for me it was one of those Ah ha! food experiences. My husband worked in a Custom Black and White photography lab that did archival photography. They did some work for the Seattle Post Intelligencer and he got to know a couple of the reporters over there. I remember we were invited by one of those couples to their home for a cocktail party.

 

Now, cocktail parties were a concept that certainly hadn't been a part of my growing up world. Parties involved whole families and, though not disdained, alcohol was not commonly consumed by the adults that I knew, not even wine. Well, here I was at my first sophisticated, adult, cocktail party. The evening, the house, everything is still very vivid to me and I really believe why it got imbedded in my memory were those marinated olives. I remember thinking, 'Amazing; I’ve eaten and loved black olives all my life but never even thought of doing something with them like marinate them in a tangy dressing'. For all the reasons I loved black olives, now they had a flavorful tang, as well. I was in love and enamored by encountering a food reality completely beyond my ken until that moment.

 

A Potato Salad Saga

If your life experiences aren’t too far out of the ordinary, at least if you grew up in America, you associate potato salad with comfort food. For me, Christmas Eve comes to mind. It’s when we would open gifts and was always celebrated at my grandparents in walking distance from our home. As the big holiday meal was the next day, a buffet was laid out for munching. The star of that buffet, at least in my mind, was my Grandma’s potato salad. My mouth waters as I think about it…the tang of cider vinegar the creaminess of added thick cream, wow. It truly celebrated the simple ingredients of potatoes, eggs and onions.

I wasn’t much of a cook most of my life until inspired by the challenge of Indian cuisine. My Indian adventures in the kitchen began to pique my interest in the broader adventure of creatively combining ingredients into something greater than the sum of their parts. In all my food challenged years, though, I was known for my (my Grandma’s) potato salad. Its simplicity might have been the secret. There are as many potato salad recipes as there are American families. Many have odd and sundry ingredients like olives, pimentos, relish, pickles, you name it. And, have you ever had a restaurant potato salad beside a sandwich you’d ordered and wondered who in the world thought it had any taste worth serving? Now, I’m not going to pick on family food heritages, but my Grandma’s potato salad has never met a person who hasn’t found it’s creamy tangy simplicity delicious, and most say so. It’s like ‘the essence of potato salad’ not cluttered with odd and sundry things for reasons of texture, or color or just automatically following the family’s oft made recipe. OK, I’m not insulting other potato salad recipes by calling them cluttered but, on a consistency scale, I bet my Grandma’s potato salad would be more universally well liked than other more “kitchen sink” versions.

I think it’s partly that the onions are chopped very fine, leaving almost an essence of onion with every bite rather than crunching down on an onion chunk every other bite or so. Also, the extra eggs, it’s a very eggy salad. You don’t have to wait for the pleasure of finding an egg chunk. And then the creaminess created by that quarter cup of unwhipped whip cream (or in my Grandma’s day, thick cream delivered by a local farmer). Its creamy texture creates a pleasing sensation in your mouth unlike some, more dry, potato salads where the potatoes are separate chunks barely blended.

Now my love of my Grandma’s potato salad has kept me uninterested for many years in ever making another version. My only problem is that I can make up 5 lbs. of potatoes and eat it all myself over several days. The other day, I went to a potluck and, unbelievably, the desire to try another version of potato salad overtook me. I munched on the proffered ‘unique to my taste buds’ version and couldn’t stop munching. How unusual, how interesting. I caught myself thinking. I knew it wouldn’t have the universal appeal of my Grandma’s potato salad but it was quite the taste treat. I also knew several people, including my husband, who would really enjoy how it incorporated its unusual ingredient - wasabi. Yes, that ‘take your breath away’ green paste mostly appearing in Japanese restaurants. Interestingly, it’s something you usually really love or you really don’t love. I’ve been in the camp of not loving it a lot – but then I don’t hang out at sushi bars amidst which it appears as an accoutrement. 

Here I was, though, savoring bite after bite of this intriguing take on potato salad. What was it? I had learned with Indian cuisine that often even stubbornly intrusive ingredients like cumin added in a blend of other spices do not assault the taste buds in the same way as when alone. Yes, I could still taste the wasabi but it blended somehow with the creaminess and other flavors and didn’t assault me as it does eaten straight. I really liked the tanginess of this potato salad.

The long and short of my potato salad saga is that I actually made it, making a potato salad other than my Grandma’s for the first time in my life. It isn’t the comfort food staple that began on Christmas Eves but it intrigues my taste buds in a very pleasing way.

I requested the recipe from the gal who brought it and found that it’s available on the Internet at:  Alan Wong's White House Wasabi Potato Salad

I cut it in half and left out the chives (I didn’t want to run them down) and parsley (I could never understand it but for some sundry green color). Here is my version that I’m munching on as I type. (And because I discussed it in-depth, below it is my Grandma Allen’s Potato Salad recipe.)

Alan Wong's White House Wasabi Potato Salad My version

If you are fond of a wasabi/horseradishy tang, you will love this potato salad.

INGREDIENTS:

4 slices bacon plus 2 Tablespoons reserved drippings
1 cups mayonnaise
1 Tablespoons creamy horseradish
1 Tablespoons wasabi paste
1 Tablespoon Dijon-style mustard
1/2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
3 Tablespoons finely chopped celery
3 Tablespoons finely chopped onion
4-5 medium Russet potatoes
(Original recipe had 1 Tablespoon chives and 1 Tablespoon parsley - I omitted)

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. In a medium saucepan, cook potatoes covered in boiling salted water till tender. Drain. Cool and chop into  1" pieces.

2. In a skillet, cook bacon over medium heat until crisp. Drain bacon on paper towels; reserve pan drippings. Cut bacon into small pieces; set aside.

3. In large bowl, combine mayonnaise, 2 Tablespoons reserved bacon drippings, horseradish, wasabi, mustard, salt and pepper until blended. Toss potatoes, bacon, celery, onion then stir in dressing carefully until combined. Cover and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Ruth Allen’s Creamy Potato Salad

(Marilyn’s maternal grandmother)

 INGREDIENTS:

1 - 5 lb. bag of Russet potatoes, peeled and quartered.
2 teaspoons of salt (for boiling potatoes)
1 large sweet onion, chopped very fine
8 large eggs, hard-boiled, peeled and chopped
2 cups of Best Foods Mayonnaise
½ cup of cider vinegar
1 teaspoon of salt

¼ cup of heavy cream or whipping cream (not whipped)


INSTRUCTIONS:

Place eggs on to boil. When they are hard boiled, peel and place them in the refrigerator to cool. (I sometimes boil them with the potatoes.)

Peel all the potatoes and cut them in quarters for boiling. Cover them with salted water.

Bring to a boil and keep them boiling uncovered for around 15 minutes keep and eye on them, a potato chunk should break easily in two when cut with a spoon or fork.)

Drain the potatoes and allow them to cool.. (Never use hot ingredients for this potato salad.)

In a food processor, finely chop the onion.

In a very large bowl, slice the potatoes and eggs, mixing chunks together but not stirring too much (the potatoes may be a little flaky.) Add the finely chopped onion, 2 cups of Best Foods Mayonnaise; slightly mix the mayonnaise into the ingredients. When the potatoes and eggs are slightly coated, add ½ cup cider vinegar and 1 teaspoon of salt. Mix until all ingredients are blended. It’s very creamy. Cover and refrigerate for a couple hours or over night. Before serving, fold in ¼ cup of whipping cream.