Winter Salad

This is a tasty little invention of mine that I call winter salad because small oranges and pears are in season in the autumn and winter.

Ingredients:

  • Mixed spring greens
  • 2 or 3 Satsumas, clementines, or tangelos
  • 1 or 2 ripe pear(s)
  • Black currants (amount to taste)
  • Almond slivers or slices (amount to taste)

Peel the oranges, carefully removing the chewy white pith, and section them (don’t slice them, leave the sections whole). Cut the pears into small chunks. Put mixed greens and 3/4 of other ingredients in the bowl and toss. Sprinkle the top with the rest of the ingredients for presentation. Serve with a salad dressing of your choice – I usually go with something vinegar and oil based.

Note: You can get black currants and almond slivers or slices in the bulk aisle. Also, do NOT use regular-sized oranges. Only the small, juicy, intensely flavorful winter oranges listed above taste good this way. If you insist on using a big orange, cut the sections into chunks. That’ll help release some juices and flavor, but it’ll still be disappointing.

Nice Salad

Tonight we concocted a salad bastardization, part chef’s salad, part salad Niçoise, mostly whatever we felt like throwing in. I’m calling it a Nice Salad because we went with a Niçoise dressing. Pardon the icky photo, I forgot to snap it until we’d tossed the salad and consumed most of it.

Ingredients:

  • Head of Romaine
  • 3 Hard boiled eggs
  • Can of solid white tuna
  • Broccoli
  • Kalamata olives
  • Red onion
  • Parmesan
  • Capers

Dressing:

  • 1 clove garlic, crushed
  • 2 tsp mustard
  • 2 tsp dried thyme
  • 2 anchovy fillets, chopped to an almost-paste
  • 5-6 tbsp cider vinegar
  • 6 tbsp olive oil

Mostly the instructions are just wash, chop, mix, etc. However, I do highly recommend the following procedure for hard boiling eggs to keep them from overcooking and smelling sulfuric:

  1. Start with refrigerated eggs, and put them in a pot filled with cold water to about 1″ above the eggs. (Yes, cold and cold. The key is to avoid overcooking.)
  2. Cover the pot and bring to a boil on high.
  3. When it starts to boil, turn the heat off, but leave the pot covered and on the stove. Set a timer for 10-15mins.
  4. When the timer goes off, put the eggs in a bowl and and run cold water over them until they’re cool enough to peel. This will stop them from cooking right away.

Caesar Salad

This is adapted from the New York Times Cook Book.  Adding the egg in at the end, after the lettuce, giving the dressing a less creamy consistency, which some people prefer.

Ingredients

  • Romaine Lettuce
  • One Clove Garlic
  • Worcester sauce
  • Tabasco
  • Mustard
  • One egg
  • Parmesan
  • Olive Oil
  • Half a lemon
  • Croutons
  • Anchovies
  • Pepper
  1. Cut a clove of garlic in half.  Rub the inside of your salad bowl with the raw end of the garlic to coat the bowl.
  2. Juice the half lemon into the bowl.
  3. Add an equivalent amount of olive oil (so there are equal parts lemon juice and olive oil.
  4. Add most of your grated Parmesan, a healthy table spoon of mustard (horseradish can be substituted as well).
  5. Add a teaspoon of Worcester sauce, and a few drops of Tabasco, and pepper to taste.
  6. Thinly slice the anchovies and add them to the bowl.
  7. Add the raw egg.  The NYT Cookbook suggests boiling it for a minute so it isn’t raw.  I don’t think this is necessary.
  8. Mix well by hand.
  9. Add the lettuce and croutons, and toss.
  10. Sprinkle the remaining Parmesan on top of the tossed salad for presentation

This is a pretty vague recipe because it can be wildly altered.  Caesar Salad means different things to different people.

Eggplant Tomato Rigatoni

We still had half an eggplant leftover from the Ratatouille, so last night I decided to try out a RealSimple recipe for Rigatoni with Sautéed Eggplant and Tomato (key ingredients are in the title plus fresh mint) with a side of A’s delicious Caesar salad and some crunchy garlic bread. With help, it took about 35 minutes of continuous activity. Alone, I would have prepped the pasta ingredients, then gotten the bread all the way to the baking stage before starting to cook anything else.

Helpful additional notes: I followed RealSimple’s recipe for crispy garlic bread rather than use my old technique (baking minced garlic and butter straight into the bread), and really liked it. Infusing olive oil with garlic then brushing it on bread was definitely a better way to get the flavor thoroughly distributed. I only wish I’d cut the bread so it had more surface area for better oil saturation.

Things I would or did change: We only had half an eggplant, and I’m glad I didn’t use more. It would have been overwhelming. I also added the parmesan in the recipe to the whole pasta bowl when I mixed in the mint and then offered more parmesan for garnish, which helped the flavor/texture. The texture would have been even better had I peeled the eggplant. I also would have used fresh basil instead of fresh mint. Yes, they’re very different flavors, but I think that the basil would have complemented the vegetables better. And, finally, it might have benefited from either some tomato paste or canned crushed tomatoes to make the sauce just a little bit more saucy.

Review: Eh. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t overwhelmingly delicious. (Except A’s Caesar. He makes a mean Caesar. Some time I’ll put the recipe up here.) It was an easy way to use up the rest of the eggplant and have leftovers.

Would I make it again? If I had some ingredients lying around and was feeling lazy, probably. Wouldn’t go out of my way for it though.