Summer Salads

Simple and easy ways to use up those farmers market finds... and keep up with how fast my herbs are growing.

The Green Salad

This idea came from an amazing omelet from The Bongo Room, which combined asparagus with English peas, with some additional brainstorming with my friend Suzanne, who suggested ideas for how to dress it, which I mostly adhered to...

We got the last peas from the farmers market last weekend; they are now officially Out of Season.  Some asparagus too.  Since I wanted the asparagus to retain some nice snap, I prepared that solely by blanching in boiling water for two minutes, then immediately dunking in ice water to stop the cooking.  The peas came already shelled, half of which I'd earlier used in a pasta salad (yum), so those simply got dumped in the bowl.  Once cool, the asparagus followed, cut into two-inch spears.

For the dressing, I threw some lemon juice, lime juice, rice wine vinegar, and coriander in the blender.  I had some leftover lamb's quarters that I needed to use up as well -- a leafy green "forage food" that's mildly bitter and great in salads with strawberries and balsamic vinaigrette. So I threw in a few leaves and blended everything together.  After finely chopping some mint leaves, I threw everything into the bowl and tossed to coat.

It turned out to be a very fresh-and-earthy tasting salad.  Despite using only a little lamb's quarter, that flavor really came through and nicely complemented the earthy asparagus and the fresh pea and mint flavors.  It had a nice balance between light and cool, and grounding.

The Red Salad

As much as we love watermelon in our household, it can still be a challenge for only two people to get through a whole big melon before it starts to go bad.  Enter the watermelon salad, a new take on watermelon that makes it different enough from ordinary, plain watermelon to make it disappear much faster.

This one is even easier than the first. Open up your watermelon, and cut the flesh into bite-sized chunks. Put the chunks into an enormous bowl, because it's a big watermelon and there's a lot of it. Throw in chunks of crumbly, tangy cheese – we have used goat cheese and feta and have loved both. On top of that, chiffonade a whole bunch of basil. This is easy to do: just stack your basil leaves on top of each other, roll them up into a little cigar, and then slice the cigar cross-wise to make long, thin strips. If you "fluff" them a bit, they will separate, and you can toss them in with your melon and cheese, then stir the whole thing up. If you have a big container with a lid, so much the better, because then you can just snap the lid on and shake.

Altogether the salad is cool, sweet, and juicy, with some nice tang from the cheese and a little accent from the basil. This could also work with mint instead of basil, although we haven't tried that yet.

My herbs are growing like crazy this year! So if you have ideas for ways to use mint, catnip, basil, sage, or cilantro, feel free to let me know. They grow faster than I can seem to eat them.

Chiles Rellenos

Or, How to Stuff a Pepper

Chiles Rellenos is a pretty simple recipe. The stuffing is made out of cooked brown rice, peas, corn, and mushrooms from the farmer's market stir-fried together with the same Apple Barbecue sauce we used in our No-Meat Loaf, and a little crumbled goat-cheese.

This is just one possible stuffing; you can pretty much just make it up as you go along. Quinoa and veggies works just as well, or salsa and cheese.

Packing the Peppers

Cut the stem off of a poblano pepper and scoop out the seeds, then stuff the rice mixture inside. Roast it in the oven until the pepper is tender, which is about 20 or 30 minutes at 350 degrees.

The side we've got pictured to the left are Dragon Tongue beans, steamed 10 minutes then tossed with a little olive oil, sea salt, and fresh ground pepper.

The result? A very balanced meal with just a bit of heat from the pepper, a touch of sweet from the apple barbecue sauce, a little tang from the goat cheese, all combining to complement the savory of the rice and veggies. Perfect.

Tofu Noodle Salad

Tofu noodles from Phoenix Bean are just great. Made fresh shortly before we bought them at the Farmer's Market, they make a great snack food right out of the bag and can be used in almost any way that noodle pastas are. We decided to make a salad out of them.





Preparation

The noodles are fairly long, so we cut them up into manageable lengths before using them. One package was enough to make our salad, and we also chopped up a cucumber, tomato, and a bunch of mushrooms. We went ahead and shredded a golden beet to add some sweetness to the mix.

To balance that out, our dressing was an eighth of a cup of olive oil and an eighth of a cup of spicy vinegar, handcrafted by Ruby Sara. The vinegar was really amazing, infused with ginger root, turmeric, and cayenne pepper. Into the dressing base we added crumbled goat cheese and mixed the whole concoction together until it was nice and creamy.

When we were ready to eat our salad we drizzled it with the dressing we'd made, tossed it all together with a little sea salt, and topped the whole thing with crumbled sweet potato tortilla chips for some added crunch and texture.

The Results

Our tofu noodle salad turned out spectacularly, with a spicy southwestern tang to it. The noodles were tender and moist, and the handcrafted vinegar made for an excellent dressing. None of the ingredients were very expensive or hard to acquire, and the results were decadent bordering on guilt — I can't help but think that I'm not well off enough to eat so well!

Filled Beignets

New Orleans's Café du Monde is famous throughout the world for its beignets, a French pastry made from fried bread. The official state doughnut of Louisiana, beignets can be made with a variety of fillings, from the sweet to the savory. We've been using the bread bible recipe based on Café du Monde's to make breakfast beignets with tremendous success.

Preparation

We make our beignets out of challah bread dough, an egg- and butter-enriched bread whose production we will examine in a future blog entry. You can theoretically make them out of almost any sort of airy dough, but we find that the challah offers a certain decadent richness perfect for a great breakfast. For our fillings we decided to experiment with peanut butter, blackberry preserves, chocolate, and goat cheese. Our four beignets were made with various combinations of these ingredients — two cheese, peanut butter, and chocolate pastries, and two blackberry and cheese beignets.

We prepped the pastries by laying out the dough with the chosen fillings atop them while we put the vegetable oil on the stove to heat up. The oil needs to reach a temperature of 360 to 370 degrees, which we measure with a candy thermometer, so we have plenty of time to get ourselves ready. While the recipe calls for two to be fried at once, we found that with how much each beignet puffs up while being cooked it was easier to just cook them individually, and it didn't take too much longer. Once the fillings were laid out on the dough, we folded the dough over and sealed the edges — wet the edges with a little water to get a good seal, if necessary.

The dough fries up pretty quickly when dropped into the oil, even accounting for the need to flip the pastry over to make sure each side cooks evenly. The recipe as written calls for two minutes per side, but we used significantly less oil and so they heated up much more quickly — we found that if we left them to fry for more than half-a-minute per side, they would start to burn. After each beignet was cooked we set it aside on a paper towel-covered plate to await its kin.

After all four were cooked (a process that took less than ten minutes including the time to let the oil reheat to 360 following each beignet) we sprinkled them with powdered sugar and gave them a short break to cool. As you can see they came out both larger and darker than we had expected, but this wasn't necessarily a bad thing.


The Outcome

The beignets came through the frying process crisp on the outside and airy on the inside. The fried bread was rich and chewy, the fillings were warm but not too hot to eat, and the individual flavors were preserved. In my estimation the blackberry preserves and goat cheese ones were slightly more successful; the chocolate and peanut butter cheese beignets were missing a certain necessary 'something' to make them perfect. All in all a successful culinary experiment that has become a regular part of our breakfast repertoire.