Salad « More Cheese More Chocolate

Sep 01 2011

Cheese, Pasta, Salad

The First Supper: Saint Paul

When you move to a city named after a saint, you should probably make a biblical reference in title of the post about the first meal in your new kitchen, right? And you should break in your new kitchen by cranking up the oven to 400-degrees twice in the same steamy afternoon to make a comforting meal and then toast your new place with tall glasses of milk and water because you forgot to buy wine, right? And you should whip out your phone to take pictures of the tourists tooling around your new neighborhood on Segways, right? Check, check, and check.

Our first home-cooked Saint Paul meal started with a lovely composed salad of golden and chioggia beets, sun gold cherry tomatoes, fresh chives, crumbled blue cheese, and a drizzle of buttermilk dressing. Simple, summery and delicious.

For the main course, we had Pimiento Mac and Cheese. I’ve been craving mac and cheese for weeks, and a scoop of the sorry excuse for it on the Whole Foods salad bar that I ate last week just didn’t cut it. I thumbed through a few cookbooks in search of a good recipe before remembering a recent issue of Bon Appetit with a picture of gooey mac and cheese on the cover. The cover photo turned out to be Pimiento Mac and Cheese, and although it wasn’t the traditional route I had originally planned on taking, it looked too good to pass up.

(Sorry for the rotten photos – I ran out of daylight.)

It was awesome! It was close enough to regular mac and cheese to satisfy my craving, but it also had enough going on to make it new and exciting, just like our new living arrangement. Instead of starting the cheese sauce with butter, flour and whole milk, you boil a red pepper in a little water until it softens and then purée it with roasted peppers, garlic and a tiny bit of butter. So, you know, you start with vegetables, and vegetables are good for you. It’s healthy. Mac and cheese for your health. Then you add a few cups of cheese to the pepper mixture and maybe you sample a little of the cheese as you’re grating it, but at least you’re adding all of that cheese to pureed peppers instead of a creamy béchamel sauce, right?

Matt declared this the best mac and cheese that I’ve ever made, and I tend to agree, which brings up a new issue: who gets to eat the leftovers?

Jun 07 2011

12 Comments

Salad, Sides

Kale Salad with Tahini-Lemon Dressing

I’m not a person who craves vegetables. I crave good bread and ice cream and chocolate and cheese and carnitas and fresh fruit and pretty much anything but vegetables. I eat my fair share of vegetables because I know it’s the right thing to do, but the only time that I actually crave them is after a few days of unhealthy eating when my body tells me I need to lighten things up a bit. And sometimes I lighten things up a bit by combining vegetables with bacon, blue cheese, and roasted chicken. Sue me.

When I was in Iowa recently, my brother whipped up a dressing, tossed it with a huge bowl of kale and called it a salad. It was super simple and totally amazing. The day after my brother made this salad, I ate a heaping serving of leftovers for lunch. This might not sound like earth-shattering information, but if you saw the overflowing cheese drawer and the abundance of good bread at my parents’ house, you would understand that this is sacrilege. I willingly and intentionally filled up some of the space in my stomach with kale when I could have filled it with Milton Creamery Prairie Breeze. I crave this salad. Hopefully you will, too.

Kale Salad with Tahini-Lemon Dressing

Inspired by my brother, Bobby

Kale
Tahini
Lemon juice
Olive oil
Garlic
Red pepper flakes
Salt
Pepper

There are no exact amounts for this, but here’s what I did: Rinse about one bunch of kale (I did 1/2 bunch of red and 1/2 bunch of green), removing the tough stems and tearing the leaves into pieces (small enough that you can easily stick them in your mouth). Mix about equal parts (Bobby’s words) lemon juice, tahini, and olive oil to yield maybe 1/2 cup of dressing. Add a minced garlic clove or two, a pinch of red pepper flakes, and season with salt and pepper. Add more lemon juice/tahini/olive oil until it tastes good to you. I also added a little lemon zest for an added zing. Pour some dressing on the kale and mix well with your hands until the greens are completely coated with (but not swimming in) dressing. Let rest for 30 minutes or longer before serving.

I am lazy when it comes to greens. I love kale, but I rarely buy it because, even though I know better, I always think that it takes a lot of work to prepare. This salad is the solution to my problem because the only work required is a little rinsing, tearing, chopping, squeezing, and whisking. In about 10 minutes you have a tasty salad, although it’s best after you let it rest for a while. Plus, unlike most green salads, you can prepare a big batch, dress it and eat it for a couple days because kale is tough stuff and doesn’t immediately turn into mush. My brother told me that this salad is his and his girlfriend’s current go-to dish to bring to potlucks, so if you have any summer parties coming up, keep this in mind.

My sister-in-law just gave me the details about a similar salad that she makes, so be on the lookout for a second kale salad recipe.

Jan 20 2011

4 Comments

Salad

Chicken Cobb Salad

I really love good salads, and maybe this is just me, but I often feel like the ones that I make at home are never quite as good as the ones that I get in restaurants. There are some exceptions, of course. I can make a better salad than one you can buy at McDonald’s or Applebees, but that’s not really saying much. I can also make a good salad with a short list of ingredients – usually some combination of greens, a fruit, cheese, and nuts. When it comes to making a good, substantial salad, though, I really struggle.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that a lot of salads that I get in restaurants have a lot of ingredients, and it can be expensive to buy a bunch of different things that may not be available in small quantities. Once you have all of the ingredients, they might need to be prepared in different ways, and throwing together a decent salad becomes quite a bit of work. The dressing is another issue. I usually stick to oil and vinegar when making salads, but sometimes a salad really needs a good, creamy dressing. I’m not a big fan of bottled salad dressings, so I tend to fall back on oil and vinegar while wishing that I had something else. Apparently I have a salad-making complex, and it’s about time that I get over it.

Lately the majority of vegetables in my diet have come in the form of either pizza sauce or celery sticks dipped in blue cheese dip, and even though it’s two degrees outside (seriously, it is 2 degrees and the windchill is -15) and I should be craving warm comfort food, all I’ve been wanting is a salad. So I fought off my fear and recreated my favorite restaurant salad: the chicken cobb salad from Salut. It has enough healthy ingredients to make you feel like you’re being good but enough non-healthy ingredients to make it worth the effort. Even though some of the ingredients need to be prepared ahead of time, you can prep a lot of them simultaneously, making it less time-consuming than it seems. You can bake the chicken and the beets at the same time and then put the bacon in the oven once the chicken is done. Boil the eggs, rinse the greens and tomatoes, chop the avocado, and crumble the blue cheese while the other things are baking, and before long you’ll have the perfect homemade salad.

Chicken Cobb Salad

Serves two

Several handfuls of lettuce or spinach
A couple handfuls of grape tomatoes
1-2 chicken breasts, baked or grilled and chopped into bite-size pieces
2-3 small beets, cooked, peeled and cubed
2-3 strips of bacon, cooked and crumbled
2 hard-boiled eggs, halved
2-3 tbsp crumbled blue cheese
1/2 or 1 avocado, peeled and cubed

In the interest of buying fewer ingredients (or possibly just forgetting about dressing until I left the grocery store…), I made a quick ranch-style dressing instead of the green goddess dressing that comes on the restaurant version. After a little tweaking it turned out fine, but it wasn’t so great that it’s worth sharing on here. Any kind of creamy, herby dressing would work well.

Sep 28 2010

8 Comments

Bread, Chocolate, Pasta, Pork, Salad

Jersey Shore Dinner

First things first, you can vote for my latest entry for Project Food Blog by clicking here. Voting lasts until Thursday. Thanks for your help!

While watching Jersey Shore a week and a half ago I got the brilliant idea to cook an Italian feast for the next week’s viewing. If you’ve ever watched the show, you know that those guidos are dumb as rocks, but they sure can cook. Did you see the delicious breakfast sandwich that The Situation made at 6AM, ate while watching Pauly D smash some girl and even offered half of it to Pauly while he was smashing? Classic. I have to say, it made me a little hungry, so why not eat some good food along with them?

Coming up with a menu for our feast was pretty easy. There had to be a pasta course, a cutlet course, and some vegetables. The only decisions left where which kind of sauce and which meat. I flipped through a few cookbooks, drooled over the pictures in The Silver Spoon Pasta book, bookmarked several pages, and ultimately settled on penne with vodka sauce, breaded pork cutlets, salad, and Italian bread.

Italian bread generally doesn’t do much for me, but I can get excited about almost any variety of bread when I’m the one making it. I found a recipe on Annie’s Eats, and I got to work.

The only change I made to the recipe was to skip the dry milk and substitute regular milk for the water, which seemed to work out fine.

The loaves were huge! I am highly amused by anything that’s much larger or smaller than normal, so these giant loaves made my day.

They were so big that they grew into each other. Does anyone remember burger buddies from Burger King circa 1989? Two mini burgers with their buns attached? I used to love those things.

This bread turned out really well, although I think it was ever so slightly over-baked. Next time I’ll probably start checking the internal temperature around the 30-minute mark instead of the 40-minute mark.

Cutlets + salad

The salad contained 1 large cucumber, 2 green bell peppers, 1/2 red onion, 3 heirloom tomatoes, crumbled feta, a handful of dill, olive oil, white wine vinegar, dried oregano, salt & pepper.

The cutlet set-up

Pound out a couple of pounds of pork cutlets until they’re an even thickness and season with salt and pepper. Dip them in flour, then beaten eggs, then breadcrumbs, and cook them in a hot skillet with a couple tablespoons each of butter and olive oil for maybe 2-3 minutes on each side. Transfer to a plate line with paper towels while you cook the rest. Serve with lemon wedges.

Making the vodka sauce. I swear I was saying, “This looks so good” as this picture was taken. I guess I need to work on coordinating my facial expressions with the words coming out of my mouth.