Tag Archives: salad

Sorta-Caesar Salad

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Well, the nice thing about this endless Seattle gloom is that the lettuce isn’t bolting.

When I first moved to Seattle, J and I lived in a tiny house, and one of the first things we did was put in a tiny garden.  We built four raised beds in the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street.  Everyone does that now, I know, but this was more than a decade ago and I liked to think of us as pioneering urban farmers back then.  (We got chickens too, of course.)

There was just one problem.  I’m from California.  And when I moved to Seattle, I was cold.  I consulted with my local garden store about what kind of vegetables I could grow in this inhospitable climate and planted things like lettuce, arugula, and broccoli.  And then I bundled them up as warm as I could.  I put hoops over the beds and sheathed them in clear plastic, trapping the heat to create toasty little greenhouses for my tender plants.  They thought it was high summer and went happily straight to seed, of course.  Learning that some plants prefer cooler temperatures was the beginning of my education about the benefits that a cool climate has to offer.  (Others include not needing much of a summer wardrobe, only needing an air conditioner a few days each year, and the blueberries.  Oh, the blueberries!)

In any case, delightful lettuces grow in this part of the world nearly year-round.  They are floppy or pert, frilly or reserved, pastel green, deep maroon, or freckled.  They are the stars of the show at springtime farmers markets, and I find them irresistible.  Here’s a nice thing to do with any sturdy, crunchy lettuce.  (Romaine is the classic, of course, as we’re riffing on the Caesar salad here, but it gets much more exciting than that.) Continue reading Sorta-Ceasar Salad (click for recipe)

A Gardener’s Garden Salad for Springtime

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I love green salads.  A crisp, lemony romaine salad?  Smoked salmon and tomatoes nestled into creamy, dill-dressed greens?  An arugula salad with grilled potatoes and blue cheese?  Yes, please.

You know what I don’t love?  The ubiquitous “garden salad” on restaurant menus.  You know the one: wilted (if not decaying) “spring mix,” a few grated carrots, hard cherry tomatoes.  That’s it.  It’s bound to be a disapointment to anyone who’s ever seen an actual garden.

I’m out to redeem the name.  This is a gardener’s garden salad.  Luckily, you can also put together a reasonable version of it if you have access to a farmer’s market, or if you have a few herbs growing on your windowsill and the good sense to buy a gorgeous, tender head of lettuce.

It’s easy to get complacent about the garden when you live in Seattle.  It rains, then it’s sunny, then it rains, so I tend to assume that everything is going ok out there without me.  Today was the first day in a while that I really poked around, and I was pleased to find that it’s time to start making salads that grew in the backyard.  (You may be lucky enough to live in a climate where your garden and farmers market have advanced beyond arugula and radishes.  Rest assured, it’s never too late to make a great salad.)

The basic equation is this: some lettuce or baby kale, some soft herbs, some edible flowers, and a light coating of chive vinaigrette.  Beyond that, it’s up to you.  Today, our salad was baby leaves of lettuce, arugula, kale, and ruby chard, a few sorrel leaves cut into ribbons, parsley, cilantro, arugula flowers, kale flowers, chive flowers, and a couple of sliced radishes.  Tomorrow, who knows?

Continue reading A Gardener’s Garden Salad for Springtime (click for recipe)

Arugula Salad with Tomatoes and Mozzarella

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Think of this as a springtime warmup to the full-on Caprese salad ahead.  In a few months, we’ll be slicing thick slabs of heirloom tomato to layer with buffalo mozzarella, juice pooling across the plate, a true summer salad.  This is that salad’s young green cousin, made before the arugula bolts, sweet with quick-ripening cherry tomatoes and enriched by a handful of creamy bambini bocconcini.  If you have a bottle of good syrupy balsamic vinegar, I recommend using it here.

Need a salad to bring to a party?  This one travels well (undressed, of course) and rates favorably on the seems-fancy-but-is-a-snap-to-prepare scale.

Continue reading Arugula Salad with Tomatoes and Mozzarella (click for recipe)

Buckwheat Soba Salad with Spicy Almond Sauce

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What kind of dinner party do you like to throw? What is your ideal number of guests? Do you have a few go-to dinner party dishes?

I like a big, casual potluck, myself.  (Or a casual dinner for a few close friends.  Notice the theme here?  Casual.)  We don’t throw nearly enough big parties these days, but I’d like to change that. The beauty of a summer potluck is the ease: clear off the counters, park a big bucket of ice or a keg in the back yard, ask a few neighbors to contribute lawn chairs.  I’m ready.  All we need now are some warm, sunny evenings.

I’m happy to announce that I’m gearing up for my real-life party plans by attending a Virtual Vegan Potluck this Saturday.  Tune in for my contribution (we’ll be rolling brown rice sushi, speaking of fun dinner party ideas), then hop around the table to see what else is cooking.  I can promise that we will all come away with enough recipe inspiration to get us through a summer’s worth of potlucks.

As it happens, a cold soba noodle salad is one of the dishes I like to take to potlucks now and then.  It’s easy to make, you can toss in whatever veggies you have handy, and the pasta easily stretches it to feed a crowd.  Maybe you toss in some tofu, maybe not.  I haven’t had a go-to dressing for my salad, though; sometimes I just did rice vinegar and sesame oil, other times a so-so peanut sauce.  That all changed this week.I love An Unrefined Vegan’s spicy almond sauce, and I hereby declare it the dressing that shall adorn my soba salads all summer long.  It was great to start with, but I doubled the almond butter and the spice because I am decadent like that, and the resulting dressing is even more creamy, spicy, and rich.  You won’t be sorry if you invite me to your potluck this summer.  Feel free to request this dish; I’ll be making it a lot, it keeps and travels well, and it’s as good cold as it is warm.  Continue reading Buckwheat Soba Salad with Spicy Almond Sauce (click for recipe)

Smoked Salmon Salade Nicoise

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Dinner outside again!  I lived in LA for three years and appreciated the weather every single day.  You can be sure that I’ll also be able to sustain this glee through every single outdoor meal of Seattle’s short summer.  Especially since it’s supposed to go right back to raining this week.

I took the picnic theme one step further by making a big main-dish composed salad, isn’t that summery?  And I was quite pleased to be one-upped in the pretending-its-summer department by our friends who served a rum punch on the deck before dinner.

Continue reading Salade Nicoise (click for recipe)

Kale Salad with Apples, Currants, and Gorgonzola

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It’s time for another hearty vegetable salad, although if you want this one last long enough to have for lunch the next day you had better at least double the recipe. It’s that good, and beautiful to boot.

Raw kale salads are run-of-the-mill these days, but this salad hails from an era when even people like us were a little skeptical about eating raw kale. It is a “massaged” kale salad that appears to have been all over the internet in 2009 with earnest promises that massaging the kale with salt would break down the cell wells and render it so tender as to be virtually cooked.

Somehow, however, this precise salad didn’t come to my attention until today, when my friend sang its praises and urgently requested the recipe from his sister via text message. Thank goodness. And now I’m sharing it with you in case it also escaped your notice in 2009.

As far as I can tell, this recipe is originally from Feeding the Whole Family by Cynthia Lair, and she got it from a colleague of hers at Bastyr University. If you want a demo of the technique, you can watch her video here, but it’s pretty basic: add salt to kale ribbons and gently knead and squeeze it in for a couple minutes, then add a ton of other delicious stuff, too.

Continue reading Kale Salad with Apples, Currants, and Gorgonzola (click for recipe)

Broccoli Salad with Ravioli, Feta, and Lemony Harissa Dressing

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I have this little food-related fantasy right around lunchtime some days.  I thought for about two seconds about whether I should share it with you all, but then I realized, YOU’RE the one reading a food blog, you must be at least as obsessed with food as I am.  So I figure you must have plenty of food fantasies of your own.  Here’s mine, which may be most recognizable to stay-at-home parents of very small children who end up eating PB&Js for lunch with one hand while holding a baby in the other arm: a drive-through (or delivery!) deli counter, featuring healthy, hearty, fresh, delectable salads.  Or, since it’s make-believe anyway, let’s just go ahead and say great salads that magically appear in my refrigerator as soon as I get hungry.

There are a few places near me that feature impressive arrays of pre-made salads, but they’re not always as good as they look.  And I want good.  So when I can manage to plan in advance, I like to make a great salad for dinner and then stock my fridge with the leftovers for weekday lunches.  This is just such a salad.  Whether you eat it at your desk or during your baby’s 10-minute nap, I recommend following it with one of those pixie tangerines that are sadly about to disappear until next year.  Almost like magic.This salad is adapted from Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Every Day.  You can play with the proportions, using more ravioli for more of a pasta salad or less for more of a broccoli salad (which I prefer).  As for the dressing, we have tried many prepared harissa pastes and currently use the Tunisian brand Les Moulins Mahjoub (it looks like this and I buy mine at The Spanish Table), but if you have another favorite I’d love to hear about it! Continue reading Broccoli Salad with Ravioli, Feta, and Lemony Harissa Dressing (click for recipe)

Green Salad with Smoked Salmon, Tomatoes, and Crème Fraiche-Dill Dressing

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J and I meet up with a lovely group of friends every few months for dinner and an evening of playing cards.  I wish I could say that we play an intellectual game, like bridge.  Or a hip game, like poker.  But we don’t.  It’s euchre.  It’s so much fun.

Last night, I lost spectacularly.  But it was still a gold-medal evening, thanks in large part to the excellent company and thanks in small part to the fact that it brought a great new salad into my life.

Our hosts made a delicious potato soup for dinner in observance of St. Patrick’s day, and I came up with this salad to go along it.  It turned out very well, if I do say so myself.  I hardly ever make a creamy salad dressing, but it was a winning combination with the smoked salmon and potato soup.  A little lemon, a little dill, a lot of tiny sweet tomatoes.  Crunch, zing, sweet, salt, smoke.  Are those the food groups or what? Continue reading Green Salad with Smoked Salmon, Tomatoes, and Crème Fraiche-Dill Dressing (click for recipe)

Vegetarian Taco Salad

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I hear that some people get tired of leftovers.  I am not really one of those people.  To me, leftovers equal free time because the cooking is already done!  Nevertheless, your pots of Black Beans with Cilantro and Lime and Quinoa with Corn, Green Onions, and Feta are probably starting to dwindle, now that you made those Black Bean Tacos and snuck a scoop of the beans for your Huevos Rancheros.  This week’s leftovers have their last hurrah in this taco salad, which could be dinner on a busy night or could just as easily travel to work for lunch.

Of course, you can make make this salad with any cooked or canned beans and grains you have on hand.  Or substitute a good handful of broken tortilla chips for the quinoa–I won’t tell. Continue reading Vegetarian Taco Salad (click for recipe)

Roasted Potato Salad with Arugula and Blue Cheese, with or without Smoked Trout

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While I have nothing but admiration for those of you who grill outdoors in the snow all winter long, that’s just not me.  First of all, it rarely snows in Seattle.  Second, grilling in a drizzle just isn’t as dramatic or satisfying as braving the snow to cook outdoors.  (I mean, I imagine that it’s not.  I’ve never actually grilled in the snow.  See above.)  Anyway, it’s not summer now, which is grilling season in my book, which is how I ended up making a winter version of one of my favorite summer salads using roasted instead of grilled potatoes.

I planned to serve this salad alongside a couple of pan-fried trout, but in the end the trout stayed safely on ice and we opened a can of smoked trout to flake into the salad to make it meal by itself.  The contrasts here are quite nice: the peppery greens, creamy blue cheese, crisp hot potatoes, and the added salt and smoke from the trout if you go that route.  Roasted Potato Salad with Arugula and Blue Cheese, with or without Smoked Trout: Slice potatoes 1/2″ thick (I used halved fingerlings), toss with olive oil and salt, and roast at 450 until crisp, turning occasionally.  Meanwhile, make a vinaigrette by mixing 1 Tbsp. sherry vinegar with 3 Tbsp. olive oil, a dab of dijon mustard, and salt and pepper.  Shake well.  When potatoes are done, lightly dress a bowl of arugula and toss well.  Add roasted potatoes and blue cheese and toss again.  Divide into bowls and top with flaked smoked trout, if using.  Dinner is served.