Category Archives: Salads

Tomato and Nectarine Salad with Basil

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It took us 11 hours to get out of the house today.  Does that happen to families that don’t have little children running around everywhere?  I can’t remember.  I don’t think so.There was playing to do in the back yard, the baby wanted to be rocked while she slept, and the bigger kids took long naps in the late afternoon.  Meanwhile, we picked through our blueberries (tiny snails were hiding in their blossom ends) and got a pot of blueberry jam simmering.  The children tasted it many, many times.  It doesn’t sound busy, does it?  Today, it was all-consuming.  We got to the park with all our bikes and scooters in the evening, just in time to ride the lakefront loop and have a picnic dinner on our girls’ favorite hidden beach at sunset.

We had a very good salad.  Continue reading →

Cucumber Salad with Fresh Mozzarella and Tomatoes

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My girls, or at least the two who are old enough to have opinions on the matter, have two favorite restaurants in Seattle.  One of them I don’t like at all.  The other is Tutta Bella, an excellent Neapolitan-style pizzeria.  Their pizzas are very good, but there’s an even-better salad that I order every single time I go.

To be clear, I also always eat pizza, but my loyalties are divided there: sometimes I have the roasted vegetables, sometimes a margarita pizza crowned with a tangle of arugula.  But I do not vary my salad order ever.  Because the salad is so good.  Mmm. Continue reading →

Israeli Couscous with Zucchini, Sungold Tomatoes, and Basil Oil

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Although I couldn’t grow a beefsteak tomato in a hundred years in my Seattle backyard, the smallest varieties grow reasonably well in a warm year (read: not this year).  So I’ve had the opportunity to get to know and love cherry tomatoes of every color.  The reds are reliable, the yellow pears add variety, the purpley-blacks are tangy and sweet.  But the loveliest of them all, for both flavor and looks, is the orange-bright Sungold tomato.  Use them here if you have them.  Grow them next year if you don’t.This is my kind of pasta dish because it’s equal parts vegetables and pasta.  Continue reading →

Raw Broccoli Salad with Raisins and Walnuts

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So here’s a nice secret that I’ll tell you more about tomorrow:  I haven’t cooked a thing all week.  We arrived home late tonight after lucking out both with the ferry times and the three sleeping children in the car.  Smooth sailing of the figurative sort, which we appreciated tonight almost as much as we appreciated the placid waters when we were out canoeing in the lake this morning with a literal boatload of our kids and our friends and their kids.  A lovely ending to a lovely week.  And not only because I didn’t have to cook.

Continue reading →

Honey Mustard Salad Dressing

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It’s easy to get into a salad rut when summer is doing its thing in the garden and salad-making is so easy.  Greens, veggies, vinaigrette, boom, salad.  But a salad can be so much more, and just a few moments of effort invested in a good dressing can go a long way toward spicing things up.

I am not the maker-of-vinaigrette in our family (thank you, J!), so on the rare occasions when the salad dressing is my job I tend to branch out, if only a little, from the standard oil-vinegar-mustard combination.  Continue reading →

Summer Squash with Feta and Fresh Herbs

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I’m no Cheryl-style desperado when it comes to dispatching zucchini.  In fact, I’m kind of pleasantly surprised when they come my way.  The squash plants in my garden are despondent and I think they may have given up for the year, so I’m glad to be getting a weekly bag of bitty squash (with flowers!) from the warm side of the mountains in my CSA box.

I know that most of you are in a different boat, though, so I thought I’d share my favorite method for cutting zucchini down to size.  This recipe (once again inspired by Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone) cooks a big pile of squash into submission all at once.  The resulting dish–sweet, herbal, salty, tender–makes a fine hot or cold salad on its own, but it’s also dandy tucked into tacos, tossed with pasta, or spread onto a summertime pizza. Continue reading Summer Squash with Feta and Fresh Herbs (click for recipe)

Crunchy Celery and Fennel Salad

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We are welcoming some new friends to Emmy Cooks today!  They are fine folks, the discerning type who chose not only to click on a “Freshly Pressed” beet recipe, but also chose to stick around and click on over here, too.  So welcome, new friends!  Here you’ll find a community of cooks and readers and writers and old friends who are always ready to answer questions, share good advice, and trade recipes and tips.  Thank you, old friends and new friends, for being here!

In the spirit of the communal table, here’s a potluck contribution that travels well, so you can take it to parties all summer.  I was inspired to make it, I confess, when I accidentally found three heads of celery in my grocery bag instead of the one I meant to buy (don’t even ask how that happened), but the happy result was a salad so crisp and lemony that I will certainly be making it again.  It joined a host of other outstanding salads in our friends’ back yard this afternoon, where I also discovered the allure of thick slabs of roasted fennel.  Just make sure you save a fennel bulb for the salad.Remember that riotous fiesta of a Summer Crunch Salad with Feta, Mint, and Lime?  The one we had to make over and over because it was so good?  This salad is a refined Italian relation: fennel, Parmesan cheese, lemon.  You could go the distance by substituting pine nuts for the pumpkin seeds.  Either way, the key elements here are the same: celery and fennel for crunch, plenty of Parmesan shavings for salt, and enough lemon juice to make the whole thing sing. Continue reading Crunchy Celery and Fennel Salad (click for recipe)

Christmas in July Lima Bean Salad

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It’s a good friend who knows what kind of gift you will appreciate.  It was a good friend who recently gave me a bag of dried Rancho Gordo Christmas Lima beans.I had heard of Rancho Gordo before, and I seem to remember that around the holidays they sold a year-long bean subscription that I considered buying myself for my birthday.  My friend’s gift inspired me to check their website for cooking tips,  which, of course, led me to the online store.  And they sell so many kinds of “glorious, old-fashioned heirloom beans” that I imagine I will be spending much more time there in the future.  And ordering glorious beans galore.  It’s a small indulgence, really.

The recipe suggestions for this chestnut-flavored bean ranged from curry to sauteed mushrooms to gorgonzola sauce.  I liked the idea of the curry flavors and I planned to serve the curried beans with this jeweled rice–but once the beans were cooked they were so good that I couldn’t bear to adulterate the flavor.  Instead I tossed a few cups of the beans with fresh herbs and a splash each of olive oil and good sherry vinegar.  I cooked a pound of dried beans and used about half for this dish. Maybe I’ll feel ready to curry the other half later this week. Continue reading Christmas Lima Bean Salad (click for recipe)

Arugula Salad with Parmesan and Toasted Walnuts

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In recent years I have prioritized raising babies over raising vegetables, and I haven’t spent much time in my garden.  It’s every vegetable for itself out there, and several have risen to the occasion by growing, flowering, going to seed, and repeating, providing me with a an annual harvest. The crops that have been most efficient in this regard–aside from the herbs; does anyone need parsley?–are a frilly lettuce, a purple kale, and the arugula.  Every spring they pop up and remind me that I had better clear some space if I want anything else to grow this year.

Last week summer came to Seattle and the garden bloomed with a sea of delicate arugula flowers.  I left several plants, of course, to ensure next year’s crop.  And I picked springtime’s last armload of arugula to take into the kitchen.

This is my favorite arugula salad (although this one, with grilled or roasted potatoes and blue cheese, is a close second).   And it’s as simple as can be: greens, grated Parmesan cheese, deeply toasted walnuts, a sweet balsamic vinaigrette.  It goes with anything, but it also makes a fine summer dinner all by itself.

Arugula Salad with Parmesan and Toasted Walnuts: Bake a couple of handfuls of walnut halves at 350, stirring often, until deeply toasted (10-12 minutes).  Meanwhile, wash and dry a big bunch of arugula and tear the leaves if they’re large.  Toss greens with a balsamic vinaigrette (2 parts olive oil to 1 part sweet and syrupy balsamic vinegar plus salt and pepper to taste), then add grated Parmesan cheese and toss again.  Top with the walnuts.

Summer Crunch Salad with Feta, Mint, and Lime

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Need a last-minute idea for tomorrow afternoon’s Fourth of July picnic?  Look no further.  After a day that started and ended with chocolate yesterday, we needed a good salad around here today.  (I don’t mean that in a we-must-repent-with-salad way.  I mean that in a let’s-have-more-cake-today-but-maybe-some-salad-too way.)

This one is a beaut.  I think that my love for radishes has been well documented here, and when I saw this Smitten Kitchen recipe I was pretty sure that a radish-less version would be a pale imitation.  But in a very unusual turn of events, my fridge is relatively bare (we were out of town for 10 days and I haven’t gone shopping yet).  The only crunchy vegetables I could scare up were romaine lettuce, a yellow pepper, a few baby carrots, and a couple of green onions.  Into the salad they went.

I toasted pepitas for more crunch, and because I was thinking of Barrio’s chopped salad, a place my mind often wanders in my wistful-for-salad moments.  I piled on the one-two-three punch (is that a thing?) of feta, mint, and lime juice, which I copied from Deb and Deb copied from April Bloomfield.  Genius.  Do it. Continue reading Summer Crunch Salad with Feta, Mint, and Lime (click for recipe)