Summer salads

 

Last week I meant to write about summer sandwiches and salads, but I got so carried away with sandwiches, I figured tacking on salads would be courting bored readers. So, today, here’s my take on salads.

We like them a lot as a one-dish light supper. Even the meat-and-potatoes man among us likes a salad. Two of our favorites are Big Mac Salad and a home-made version of taco salad.

Big Mac salad

Big Mac is just what it sounds like—all the ingredients of a Big Mac, except in salad form. Crumbled hamburger, grated cheddar, chopped tomatoes, pickles, red onion diced or in rings, chopped head lettuce. Dress it with Thousand Island. You can use bottled, but if you do I recommend one of the “designer” brands like Marie’s. Better yet, make your own—my recipe was in last week’s Gourmet column.

My version of taco salad

Taco salad is a flexible thing, and you can pretty much add what you want. But I had a recipe from a long-ago friend that my kids grew up on: Susie K’s Salad. It’s the inspiration for my version of taco salad.

1 lb hamburger

1 envelope taco seasoning or make your own (homemade does not have preservatives and it’s easy, using spices you have on hand)

1 can beans – I like pinto, the rest of the family likes black

Grated cheddar

Chopped tomatoes

Chopped head lettuce

Onion – either red or diced green onions

Dressing – Christian insists on the classic Catalina dressing, which I find too sweet; the seasoning on the hamburger is enough for me, so I take mine out and then dress the rest with Catalina.

Fritos – here’s the important thing about Fritos: add them individually to each serving. The rest of the salad will keep a day if there are leftovers, but the Fritos get mushy and awful.

Make your own taco seasoning: 1 Tbsp. chili powder; 1 tsp. garlic powder; ¼ tsp. onion powder; ¼ tsp. oregano; ½ tsp. paprika; 1 tsp. cumin; 1 tsp. salt; 1 tsp. finely ground black pepper; Crushed red pepper to taste, optional

Store it in the freezer between uses.

Wilted lettuce

           The first time I mentioned wilted lettuce, Christian look appalled. But when I fixed it, he liked it a lot. This is one my mom used to make with fresh leaf lettuce from Dad’s garden. To me, you just fry some bacon and save the grease. Tear lettuce into a bowl, add green onions if you want. Pour warm grease—yes, warm!—over the greens, add enough vinegar, and crumble bacon. But in order to write about it, I went online and looked up proportions. Four or five pieces of bacon should produce enough bacon and grease for a salad for four; the online recipe called for two Tbsp. red wine vinegar and 1 Tbsp. lemon juice. I substituted three Tbsp. apple cider vinegar, and it tasted just like Mom’s.

The best-ever blue cheese salad

Jordan and I can make a meal of this: Christian and Jacob, not so much. But it truly is the best blue cheese salad I’ve ever had. The salad goes together backward and is best if you use a seasoned, unfinished wooden salad bowl. Over time this salad will season the bowl even more.

Garlic clove, split

Salt, pepper

Dry mustard

Crumbled blue cheese

Cider vinegar

Olive oil

Rub the salad bowl thoroughly with both pieces of the split garlic clove and then with salt, pepper, and dry mustard. Not a whole lot of any spice, particularly the mustard. You may have to experiment and find out how much is right for you. Crumble blue cheese into the bottom of the bowl. Add maybe a fourth cup of vinegar—and mush the cheese around in it with a fork, until you have a thick liquid. Add olive oil. Remember, the classic proportions are one part vinegar to three parts olive oil. This is Jordan’s salad, and she makes it for us, but sometimes she gets it a little bit stout. Also it’s easy to make too much—if you start with too much vinegar and then balance with the oil, you sometimes have enough to make salad soup. Just pour some off and save it in a refrigerator container. You want the dressing to coat every bit of the lettuce but lightly.

Add torn lettuce and toss. You might taste and adjust as needed.

A final note: Jordan wants to fix blue cheese salad every night; I want to vary our salads, and I experiment with lots of dressings. But recently I read a rave review of Trader Joe’s Goddess Dressing and bought a bottle—haven’t tried it yet, so this is an untested recommendation.

For fall back, we like Newman’s Own Classic Oil and Vinegar (not the vinaigrette with balsamic vinegar). For a light lunch, cut up a bit of tomato, carrot, onion, cucumber; add enough cottage cheese to sort of hold it all together, and douse it with Newman’s Own. It’s another of those dishes that gets out of hand easily, and I sometimes end up with huge servings.

Have a cool summer eating salad!

 

Summer sandwiches

 

My family really likes sub-style sandwiches. Our favorites come from Great Outdoors, and a take-out order from them has frequently been our dinner. One of the treat things is that everyone can choose different ingredients—and believe me, we all have different tastes.

I don’t mean to take business from Great Outdoors—I’ve been a steady customer too long—but on our recent weekend at the lake, Jordan proved we can do similar sandwiches ourselves. She rocked it! Here’s what she did:

Ingredients

Bread – 6” sub roll is traditional, but Jordan used hamburger buns, and I have made single sandwiches on slider buns. You could use ciabatta, too.

Mayonnaise or olive oil

Lunch meat – your choice. The Burtons like pastrami, while I prefer turkey and ham, but there are several varieties of salami, pepperoni if you like it, etc.

Cheese – again, your choice. Christian and I like provolone; Jordan and Jacob prefer cheddar

Sliced tomato

Thinly sliced red onion

Chopped iceberg lettuce – sprouts would be good too.

Red wine vinegar – or vinaigrette (see below)

Sprinkling of dried oregano

Directions

Here’s the big thing we learned: spread the insides of both top and bottom breads with either mayo or olive oil, to taste—this provides a barrier so that the sandwich ingredients don’t make the bread soggy.

Layer ingredients in the order listed above, piling on as much as you want, but don’t settle for a single piece of ham and a single piece of cheese. You want a hefty sandwich.

We topped our sandwiches with a red wine vinaigrette that I happened on to in a recipe for salmon one night. It was so good on the salmon, we decided to use it lots of places.

Red wine vinaigrette

¼ c. olive oil

2 Tbsp. red wine vinegar

2 Tbsp. lemon juice

1 clove garlic, peeled and then pressed

1 tsp. Dijon

½ tsp. salt

¼ tsp. pepper

A variation of the sandwich makes use of Thousand Island dressing. At Fort Worth’s Colonial Country Club, it was called the Colonial Country Club sandwich. It’s no longer on the menu, but you can ask for it by name and the kitchen will fix it. I’ve been making it occasionally for myself for years.

Ingredients

Rye bread

Ham

Turkey

Provolone

Thousand Island dressing

Toast the rye, layer the ingredients, and top with a generous amount of dressing. There may have been a hard-boiled egg, sliced, but I don’t do that. The sandwich was always accompanied by cole slaw, but I bet topping it with slaw or chopped lettuce would be a good addition. I don’t, however, much like bottled Thousand Island, so here’s a recipe for home-made.

Ingredients

1 c, mayonnaise

¼ c. ketchup

2 Tbsp. sweet pickle relish (dill will work if that’s your preference)

1 tsp. cider vinegar

1 small onion, diced fine

Pinch salt and pepper

I intended to do a combined blog about summer sandwiches and salads, but this has gone on too long. Salads next week.

 

Another lesson learned

 

Asian chicken salad

Ask my friends. They know and bemoan that I’m not a big fan of Asian food. If we’re going out to dinner together, don’t tell me about your favorite Thai restaurant. And don’t try to persuade me that I can order the spices mild—I don’t trust that. Mostly, though, my antipathy is based on lack of knowledge and exposure.

I think I remember as a kid having what went by the name of chop suey—mushy vegetables and chicken or beef in a sauce over rice and topped with those canned chow mein noodles. I can’t imagine that my meat-and-potatoes father much liked it. (I forget about chow mein noodles, but Christian and I agreed the other night they would be good in place of croutons in a salad—they are, I think, pretty high in sodium though.) I’ve thought about recreating that chop suey for us—you can still buy canned vegetables, but I don’t think they would go over well. I could use fresh veggies—this idea appeals—but I guess I’d use carrots, onion, broccoli, and bean sprouts, most of which aren’t well received in this house. And, basically, what’s the difference between the stir-fry we make today and the chop suey I ate as a kid, except that the vegetables are fresh. I do like the flavor soy sauce gives to everything from meat to vegetables. I am leery of fish sauce though—something I should maybe try in recipes.

Now that I’ve written that, I want stir-fry. Christian does a mean job with it. He also recently made fried rice that was excellent. But I digress. I started out to write about my learning lesson. I found a recipe for an Asian cold salad and thought that would meet Jordan’s wish for light summer meals and Christian’s taste for Asian. Besides it was fairly straightforward and simple.

Chicken salad

1 rotisseries chicken, boned and diced

8 oz. dried rice noodles

Iceberg lettuce, chopped

3 green onions

Sesame seeds, toasted

Dressing

3 Tbsp. brown sugar

2 tsp. soy sauce

1 Tbsp. sesame oil

3 Tbsp. rice vinegar

Make the dressing ahead of time and set aside. Toast sesame seeds, watching closely so you don’t burn them and have to do a second batch. Cook the rice noodles—and boom! That’s where I got in trouble.

The noodles looked like strips of cellophane, but they were stiff, crisp, hard. The recipe said to heat a bit of neutral oil in a skillet and toss the noodles in by handfuls. They would, the printed page promised, turn white and puff up. Well, some did, and some didn’t. We would never need chow mein noodles on our salad, because most of what we came up with was still crisp. (The recipe warned that if not properly puffed and white, they would be like eating needles—good description.)

In a fit of exasperation, Jordan picked up the noodle package, reached for my glasses, and read the directions. It said to pour boiling water over them, let stand three minutes, and drain. “Where did you get the idea of frying them?” she asked, her tone clearly implying that it was some bit of idiocy on my part. I waved the recipe in front of her.

But with reconstituted noodles, not fried, the salad made a lovely meal, with some leftovers. Just toss it all together—chicken, noodles, lettuce, sesame seed, and the dressing. Easy. Barely any cooking required.

This may be something many of you already know, and my blunder was due to my being relatively uninformed about Asian recipes. I will say in my own defense, I like sushi, particularly salmon sashimi but also some sushi rolls with salmon. I don’t branch out to other fish much, though as much as I like tuna, I should.

And I’m still working on that chop suey idea.

Turning leftovers into an omelet

Jamie Oliver's 45-second omelet

To me, leftovers are a gift. It’s a good thing because I’ve been eating a lot of them lately, a side benefit of having done a lot of cooking. I’ve had coulibiac (individual hand patties, like pasties, with a salmon filling), marinated vegetables, remains of a family favorite casserole, hot dogs and beans from the Fourth. Such good lunches and suppers.

One night this week, I composed supper out of leftovers. It was delicious, though it didn’t look as pretty as I hoped. It was, sort of, an omelet. I’ve never successfully made an omelet in my life. I think Lisa, daughter-in-law, used to make them frequently and had a special pan for them. I don’t have that—just a flat skillet.

I’d read recently about Jamie Oliver’s 45-second omelet that is light and fluffy. His basic technique is to beat two eggs until all the streaks disappear, get a skillet very hot, add a small glug (I love cooks who refer to a glug as a measurement—it’s actually a sound) of oil or butter, add eggs. Trick is to have a big skillet, so that the eggs are a really thin layer. Immediately sprinkle with Parmesan and remove from the heat. Then keep “nudging” at the edge with your spatula. The eggs will continue to cook. You can read a much better description and instructions here: I Tried Jamie Oliver's 45-Second Omelet | Kitchn (thekitchn.com)

Of course, my downfall was that I didn’t stick to the instructions religiously. You see, it was the leftovers. I had a bit of smoked salmon that was about to run out of date, and two half-containers of fresh mushrooms that cried out to be used. And then a neighbor, leaving town, gave me a pint of cippolini mushrooms, tiny little things that I would have called boiler onions.

I tried peeling—got two onions done and realized I would be at it all day. There had to be a better way. Naturally, I went online to look up cippolini—the only thing I knew was that I used to like a funky little restaurant in Austin with that name. It seems the trick is to spread the cippolini out in a pan, cover with boiling water, and let sit for five minutes. Even so, they’re not easy to peel and even more difficult to slice without taking your thumb with them. But they have a lot of sugar and caramelize nicely.

Before I started my omelet, I sauteed the onions and mushrooms together and diced the salmon. Had them all ready to go, next to my hot plate. Then I whisked the eggs with a bit of salt (not too much because the salmon is salty) and pepper. But then I made errors in judgement—at least, if I wanted a pretty omelet like the one in the picture.

First of all, my mind can’t get past one person, small skillet. So I used too small a skillet and my egg layer wasn’t as thin as Oliver’s. And instead of a light dusting of Parmesan I added these heavier ingredients—mushrooms, onions no matter how tiny, and salmon. It was too much for two eggs, so as I folded the eggs turned into cooked strands. But I kept “nudging” and folding until the eggs were soft done, the way I like them. The result wasn’t pretty, but it was absolutely delicious. And I’m the kind of cook who will take taste over looks any day. No matter that my mom always insisted that food is half eaten with the eye.

Think of the omelets you’ve had in restaurants—fluffy and pretty, bursting with potatoes and other vegetables, sometimes meat, lots of cheese. It just may be that you can make that kind—Lisa, where is your pan?—or you can make Jamie Oliver’s. The third choice is to make a messy but delicious omelet like I did. What’s on your plate?

Judy's messy omelet

Oh those tea parties!

 

What comes to mind when someone says high tea to you? I think of a snooty woman with a lorgnette holding a fine china cup of tea, her little finger crooked in the air. But according to some web sites, I’m all wrong. That would be afternoon tea, as served in boutique and upscale hotels across the country. Afternoon tea features dainty finger sandwiches, fruit, cheeses, scones, and other sweets or cakes. And tea—a wide choice of fine tea. It’s an upper-class snack that traces back to a nineteenth-century noblewoman in England who became “peckish” during the long hiatus between the noonday meal and dinner, which was often not eaten until seven or eight.

High tea on the other hand is a heavier meal of the working class, usually eaten around 5:00 or 600 p.m. The meal consists of substantial food, enough to sustain a man who had been working hard all day--cold meats, vegetables, pickled fish, potatoes, salads, pies, tarts, homemade bread or crackers with butter, teacakes, and fruitcakes. Legend varies as to the origin of the name—some say people sat in high-backed chairs while eating; others claim they sat at high tables, as opposed to the low tables used for afternoon tea.

I’m an afternoon tea fan myself. My father, a Canadian native and very much an Anglophile in his outlook on life, relished his afternoon tea every day after he retired. He liked his tea as the British do—half milk and half tea—and Mom always had some sweet treat to go with it. But the thing that intrigues me about afternoon tea is the finger sandwiches.

The other night I flew in the face of tradition and served finger sandwiches—cucumber/cream cheese and egg salad—for happy hour. And ate them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner the next day. There are a few cautions to remember when making these delicacies. One is the bread: I find that Pepperidge Farm thin-sliced white sandwich bread works best. It holds up rather than turning to cotton in your mouth. For some fillings, such as smoked salmon, rye or even pumpernickel may be appropriate and in other cases a good wheat, but it should be a firm, thin-sliced bread. Also remember that to be really elegant you want to trim the crusts off (I know, wasteful!) and cut the sandwich into diagonal halves or even quarters—or maybe long thin strips, three from each sandwich. Square slices of bread work best, which is another reason sandwich bread is so good.

Another caution is that everything should be finely minced and diced. I make a fairly chunky egg salad, but if it’s for finger sandwiches, I dice the eggs into the tiniest bits. And finally, be sparing with what you use to bind ingredients. You do not want the sandwiches to get soggy. Especially if you make sandwiches ahead, it’s best to coat the interior sides of the sandwich bread with a thin layer of butter. Mayonnaise, or cream cheese spread.

Here’s what I did:

Egg salad filling

4 eggs, hard-boiled, peeled, and finely diced

3-4 Tbsp. mayonnaise

1 Tbsp. capers, well drained and finely chopped

Salt and pepper to taste

Cucumber/cream cheese filling

           Cucumbers have a lot of water content, so slice thinly, lay out on paper towels, salt lightly, and cover with another paper towel. Press to release liquid and let it sit while you prepare the rest of the filling.

1 English cucumber

8 oz. cream cheese, softened to room temperature

¼ c. mayonnaise

1 tsp. dried dill weed (or 2 Tbsp. minced fresh)

1 Tbsp. lemon juice

¼ tsp. garlic power

           Spread each piece of bread with the filling. Top one slice with cucumbers and then add the next slice. Having the filling on each piece in a sandwich presents a barrier to keep moisture from the cucumber from making the bread soggy.

There are countless other combinations you can use for filling. The cream cheese spread above is delicious with smoked salmon instead of cucumber—or maybe both. Try some of these other fillings: chicken salad, perhaps with a touch of curry; tuna salad; ham salad, maybe add thinly sliced apple; pimiento cheese; roast beef with blue cheese; crab with basil and a cream cheese spread; goat cheese and chopped pecans. Use your imagination—the possibilities are endless.

Finger sandwiches make a great light meal for summer. Just add a big salad to the menu. Enjoy!