Blog Archives
You Can Teach a Dog New Tricks {CtBF}
It’s summer! I know we haven’t hit the summer solstice yet, but Memorial Day is the informal start date to summer in my mental calendar. Summer means lots of fresh vegetables and salads, salads, salads. I love salads. When I look at my recipe box, the Salad section is nearly as thick as Sweets. Certainly, it’s the most heavily used.
Panzanella, or simply “Bread Salad” as it’s known at my house, is always a favorite. Croutons of rustic bread tossed with lots of savory ingredients and a tangy dressing make regular appearances. I also make Fattoush, which uses crumbled toasted pita for the bread and has a Middle Eastern flavor profile.
Even when I already have a favorite recipe for something, I’m always open to a new twist. This week’s recipe for Cook the Book Fridays offers just that. David Lebovitz’s version is similar to yet different from mine.
Similar are the chopped vegetables (cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and scallions) and the herbs (parsley and mint). Different: he uses sliced radishes instead of the chopped red pepper in mine. I like the radishes better. Different: he adds a healthy dose of hearty lettuce, making his fattoush more like a green salad. I tried it, but definitely prefer this salad without the lettuce. We both use a lemony dressing and a tangy sprinkle of sumac. David’s dressing with the additions of garlic and mustard has more zing than my simple lemon vinaigrette and is the clear winner.
Lettuce Plus Parsley and 3 kinds of garden-fresh mint!
Fattoush is in the First Courses chapter of David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen. The first night I made it, I was home alone. I made the dressing in a jar instead of the salad bowl so I could use it for several smaller batches of this salad. Dressed salads especially those made with crisp bread are not good keepers. I cut up vegetables to make a quarter of the recipe, even though it serves 6. With a little bit of cheese and crackers on the side, I found that the salad was substantial enough to count as dinner. I made half the recipe another night which Howard and I shared along with a beet salad for our meal.
This recipe was worth trying. It was good, but it won’t displace my own favorite recipe. However, I definitely plan to incorporate parts of his recipe (radishes, dressing) into mine as we move ahead into summer.
The highlight of my Memorial Day weekend was a short hike in nearby Concord Massachusetts to check out a blue heron rookery. I occasionally catch one wading in the pond Bella and I walk around every morning. And I love the prehistoric look of herons flying overhead. They remind me of pterodactyls. When my neighbor (hi, Cass!) told me where to find the rookery, I channeled my inner Mary (Hirsch), had Howard find the binoculars, and we went for a ride.
Observing their high nests on top of dead or dying trees in a marsh, I was surprised to see both parents tending one or two babies in each nest. There were 6-8 nests in all. The babies seemed to be getting ready to fly. We saw a couple of them perched on the edge of the nest where it looked like they were working up the courage to step off and test their wings. This week, I expect they have already flown off. I wish them safe travels.
Back to the food, if you want to try fattoush for yourself, you can find the recipe on page 116 of My Paris Kitchen. To see what my friends thought of their salads, check their links here.
Cook the Book Fridays was formed by bloggers who met through French Fridays with Dorie, have remained friends, and enjoy cooking together (virtually anyway). Others have joined us in this new adventure cooking through another French cookbook, David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen. You can too!
A New Project Afoot: Winter Salad {CtBF}
Last June, I finished a multi-year project of cooking through a cookbook (Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table). Through the process, my cooking skills and recipe repertoire expectedly expanded. Unexpectedly, as I compared notes with the other participants week after week about the recipes we prepared, my circle of friends expanded. Through our shared experience, I met others from around the world who shared my passion for cookbooks and food and home cooking. Even more unexpectedly, we found occasions to meet in person, bringing these friendships from the virtual world into the real one.
It’s been more than seven months since that project ended. The friendships continued. A handful of us joined Andrea, the Kitchen Lioness, in her Cottage Cooking Club, but many of us found that we missed sharing a common project and cooking together more regularly. As 2016 kicked off, Katie, the Prof Who Cooks, jumped in to lead the charge and rally the troops to embark on a new project this week. With “Cook the Book Fridays”, this group of cooking friends will start working our way through David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen. I am thrilled to have a regular date scheduled with my blogging friends again.
This week, we start off with a Winter Salad. For this simple recipe, bâtons of Belgian endive are tossed with a thick Roquefort dressing. Roquefort, a sheep’s milk blue cheese, has a strong yet smooth flavor. It lacks the metallic aftertaste I find with many blue cheeses. The bitter greens contrast with the creamy dressing for an interesting salad for this time of year.
I had some trouble envisioning how to cut the endive. Cut it lengthwise, then lengthwise again? I was assuming that all the layers would have fall apart with the first set of cuts. Fortunately, it made more sense as I went along. Even with the root trimmed off, the first cut yielded slabs that could be cut lengthwise again to create the requisite bâtons. Voilà!
For the dressing, you mash the Roquefort into Greek yogurt, adding some zip with fresh lemon juice and some color with minced chives. The recipe makes a generous amount. I halved the entire recipe and still had half the dressing left over.
You really need to make this salad right before you eat it. We didn’t finish it all, so I ate the rest for lunch the next day. Not so good. The endive became soft, and without its crisp texture, didn’t have the same appeal as the freshly made salad.
It might be sacrilege to suggest it, but this salad (and/or the leftover dressing) would be perfect alongside Buffalo chicken wings to enjoy while watching Sunday’s Super Bowl: a French twist to an all-American event. (Admittedly, the game won’t be tuned in at our house, though we will be enjoying chili and other Super Bowl appropriate snacks. It’s not because the New England Patriots aren’t playing. I’m just anti-football.)
If this salad sounds good to you, check out what my friends thought of it here. Stay tuned every two weeks for my experience with another new recipe. Due to copyright considerations, I don’t share the recipe on my blog. You can find it on page 98 of David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen. Or feel free to drop me a line and I’ll share it with you.
A Plateful of Happiness 