52 Recipes: Of salads, and the necessary diversification thereof.
Yes, this does represent a pathetic and probably doomed attempt to catch up to my target in 52 Recipes in 2010 terms; somehow, a breaking laptop appears to have knocked me off kilter blog-wise, and it’s taking me a while to get back on the horse, not least because I now feel I have such a backlog of things – really important things, like the small girl’s BIRTHDAY and the progress we’ve been making on Earthenhouse (which is significant and immensely cheering, since you ask) – that I don’t quite know where to begin; as I’m not posting from my laptop, though, I haven’t got access to photos, and, really, what’s a birthday post without pictures? Hence, this post, as an ice-breaker.
Ahem.
Perhaps it’s a response to a week spent at my mother-in-law’s house, where salad = lettuce, tomato and cucumber, sliced, and plonked on a plate with a jar of mayonnaise handily to one side, but this last couple of weeks has seen us jumping on the salad bandwagon in a hitherto unknown manner. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that we don’t eat salad, it’s just that Quercus and I tend to prefer our salad with pretensions, and eating lots of plain lettuce went some way to reminding me just why that is: without dressing or bits and bobs to encourage me, lettuce and I suffer from a mutual lack of interest. So, instead, here are some of the things we’ve been noshing our way through lately.
Lentilmus
Ingredients
A large mug of lentils, red, green or puy, boiled until they won’t kill you, with
A stock cube of some variety (unknown, in this case, as all the bloody wrappers look the same)
Probably six cloves of garlic, chopped
A handful of herbs
About 3 tbsp olive/sunflower oil
About 2 tbsp mayonnaise
About 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
A good sprunkle* of black pepper
Then…
Boil up the lentils, herbs, garlic and stockcube until the lentils are soft but not mushy. Drain them and leave them in a colander to cool off a bit, before chucking the other things in, mixing well, and bingo! A lentil-orientated version of hummus.
Pasta Stars
Ingredients
As much cooked and cooled pasta as you fancy (we had some tiny stars bought yonks ago in a French supermarket)
Chopped tomatoes
Chopped basil
Grated courgette
Dressing:
2 tbsp natural yoghurt
1 tbsp mayonnaise
2 tbsp sunflower/olive oil
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
Good sprunkle of black pepper
Squirt of tomato purée
Splosh of water
Then…
Sling dressing ingredients in a small box or bottle and shake maniacally until you realise that a spoon may be called for. Stir, resentfully. Resume shaking. Give in, resign self to small yoghurty bits and pour over pasta, tomatoes and courgettes, kidding self that pepper disguises all errors.
Coronation, er, Salad
Ingredients
About half a mug of leftover pilau rice
Chopped onion, tomato, apricots, cucumber etc.
Oh, and pinenuts
A daring tablespoon of mild curry powder
2 less darings of yoghurt
A slug of olive/sunflower oil
Then…
Mix it all up into a large sticky mess, wonder what on earth you’re doing, realise it actually tastes delicious despite visual misgivings, and scoff the lot.
Other current salady infatuations include adding grated apple to everything, and ditto sultanas, chopped unsulphured apricots and sunflower seeds. And you? What’re you stuffing down gleefully as the salad season gets under way?
*Sprunkle, n: An inflation-linked sprinkle. Origin: colloq., Devon. (Ahem the second.)
Bulghur pesto salad:
* One jar of Pesto
* Some bulghar wheat
* Some spring onions
* Some freshly grated parmazan
* Half a freshly squeezed lemon
* 500ml veg stock
* Maybe some olive oil
* Maybe some basil leaves
Take a 500ml measuring jug and fill it to the halfway live with bulghar wheat. Now add half the jar of pesto and give it a good stir.
Chuck it all in a non-stick saucepan over a moderate heat and give it a good stir around. Meanwhile, make the stock in the measuring jug so that you’re not wasting any of the pesto. Add the stock to the bulghar wheat. Turn the heat up and bring it to the boil. Turn it right down and simmer for… I don’t know. Not long at all. Put the lid on and remove it from the heat, it pretty much cooks itself.
Chop up your spring onions, grate your cheese, tear up your basil, squeeze your lemon. The time it takes you to do all these things is roughly the time it takes your bulghar wheat to finish doing its thing with the stock. Stir in the onions, the parmazan and the lemon juice. If you’re using fresh basil leaves you might want to hold some back as a garnish. The parmazan too.
Stir in the remaining pesto.
Maybe a dash of olive oil, salt, pepper… You can eat it right away, or chill it then eat it.
That’s pretty much it.
n.b. above recipe pasted in directly from an email from my brother, hence the unconventional spellings.
Also:
Cannellini beans with cubes of feta and some sort of light dressing.
Pasta with avocado and tomato and cucumber and a dash of lemon juice
Roast beetroot wedges with maybe blue cheese, or something.
We too like our salads with pretensions. I have banned lettuce from the veg box.
I’m just so excited to be able to comment here. Whatever glitch was preventing me seems to have gone away. I’ll stop now, though.
Last night:
Tilapia, salted, peppered and quick-seared to get a nice golden crust, flipped and cooked nearly through, remove from pan (We did about 8 fillets as we had guests AND we wanted to do tonight’s night-after-that-tilapia dish)
Erm… about… 1/2 cup dry vermouth? Or so – I slosh it in until it looks enough
about 1 1/2 cups give or take of chicken stock,
zest of 1/2 lemon
Reduce until it looks, well, reduced enough (damn this recipe writing stuff is HARD)
Stir in 1 1/2 – 2 tbsp dijon mustard (to taste, you know)and juice of 1/2 lemon. Return tilapia to pan with sauce and warm through. Serve with cous-cous and pan-seared asparagus.
Is v. lovely!
Note: MAYONNAISE?? On salad? Really and truly? I mean… no offense meant but… gak.
OooooAhhh….Mmmmmmmmmm!
My latest invention, saladwise, is:
1 cup quinoa cooked as usual with 2 cups water (or broth)
1 tart apple (large) diced
1 generous handful of gorgonzola crumbled
6 large mint leaves, fresh from the garden diced teeny
stir together and add dressing compoosed of:
glurg of balsamic vingar
half a shot of lemon juice
dollop of homemade mayo or homemade yogurt (whichever is first in the fridge)
whisk together and lovingly dress the aforementions concoction….YUM!
Fresh and springlike…also zenlike mixture of textures exploding in your mouth!
As I’m sure I’ve said before, I don’t do green.
This means summer=same foods as always/not salad.
Megan, if I’m forced to eat salad, then mayo is the only thing that makes it half-way palatable…
Tabouleh
Bulghur wheat, in a bowl (half a mug per person, if you’re quite greedy like me)
Completely cover with boiling water and cover the bowl with a lid
Leave for about 20 minutes
Meanwhile chop loads of parsley, coriander, mint and tomato
When wheat is all “done”, stir all other stuff in and put in loads of lemon juice, salt, pepper and a good glug of olive oil.
We have this with skewered marinated lamb kebabs and a yoghurt/coriander dressing
(I, like you, *have* to have a dressed salad. Otherwise, it’s just leaves)