Composed salads

Salade Nicoise

No, composed salads are not those jellied concoctions that were popular in your grandma’s day and showed up on her table every Sunday when you were a kid. Remember? Orange Jell-O with grated carrots and pineapple chunks? Cherry Jell-O with dark cherries and—shhh! —port wine. Or jellied gazpacho. (I really liked some of those, though pistachio and Cool Whip were a bit much for me.)

Composed salads are simply salads where the ingredients are laid out on a plate instead of tossed in a bowl. Traditionally when you serve them at home, you lay the ingredients out on one large platter. Diners help themselves, but we all know that self-service can get kind of messy. For a small crowd—two to four—I sometimes serve individual salads laid out in soup plates. You can dress the individual dishes or pass a small pitcher of dressing.

The nice thing about them is you can use almost any ingredients that strike your fancy. There are, however, two basic composed salads familiar to everyone who has ever had lunch in a bistro café. Both of these are often served on a bed of lettuce.

Cobb salad

Cobb salad started in the 1930s at the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood. Owner Bob Cobb went prowling in his restaurant’s refrigerator for leftovers, arranged them on a plate, drizzled French dressing over the dish, and there it was. Within days it was on the menu

Traditional ingredients are cold chicken breast, often diced, tomato (halved cherry tomatoes are good), green beans, tiny potatoes, cheese (sometimes blue, sometimes cheddar), avocado, bacon bits, sometimes artichoke hearts.

Cobb used French dressing on his salad but use your imagination. I think a good vinaigrette is nice because it accents the flavor of the ingredients without overwhelming them. But restaurants frequently offer a choice, so feel free to use ranch, blue cheese, Italian, honey-mustard, whatever suits.

Salade Niçoise

Whereas Cobb features chicken, salade Niçoise is built around tuna. I like to do it with high quality canned albacore in water.

Olives are also traditional, but I omit them because olives are on the short list of things I just don’t eat. But tiny baby potatoes, peeled, boiled, and cut in quarters if necessary, green beans, hard-boiled eggs are all common. I sometimes add asparagus.

The following two dressings are good on Cobb salad or salade Niçoise as well as a plain green salad.

Avocado salad dressing

1 lg. avocado, soft, ready to use; peeled and cut into chunks

2 tsp. lemon juice

½ cup. Greek yogurt

Hot sauce to taste--I sprinkle a few drops

1/4 cup olive oil

2 garlic cloves

3/4 tsp. salt

Throw it all in the food processor. The avocado is hard to blend--chunks keep reappearing. It’s easier if the avocado is very ripe and soft. You have to scrape down the sides and continue to blend until you don't see chunks. But this is really good and healthy.

Creamy blue cheese salad dressing

2 Tbsp. each mayonnaise, sour cream, and buttermilk

1 tsp. lemon juice

¼ tsp. pepper

¼ tsp. Kosher salt

1 anchovy fillet, mashed (optional or use a tsp. of anchovy paste)

Blue cheese – 2-3 Tbsp. to taste

1 finely chopped scallion

Mix all ingredients, adding cheese and scallion last. If dressing is too thick, sparingly add more buttermilk.

This is classic for wedge salads but also good on torn leaf lettuce and any number of other good things.

Nothing better than a main-dish cold salad on a hot spring day.

Blending holidays

I’ve had some cooking adventures lately, exploring dishes that ordinarily I would never make, and I credit the pandemic with helping me stretch my skills. After I posted about a chicken loaf, a friend sent me the recipe for a tuna loaf—loved it, even if I did substitute scallions for the green olives which I cannot abide. And I made a stir-fry with ground pork and asparagus—whole family loved it. My takeaway was that it’s really hard to mince fresh ginger!

But my greatest culinary coup of the week was something I didn’t cook but provided directions for. When my daughter asked what we should cook for Easter dinner in isolation, I suggested what I consider the stand-bys—a ham or a leg of lamb. She doesn’t like ham, and Christian didn’t like the idea of lamb. I settled on a brisket, which to me is a Passover dish. I joked about a Passover brisket for Easter, but it seemed pretty ecumenical to me. And  rather than a new dish, it was one that brought back long-ago memories.

Years ago, in what seems like another life, I was married to a Jewish man whose mother made a delicious brisket. I thought I remembered how she did it, but checked with my brother-in-law, with whom I am still close. He complained he only eats it; his wife cooks it. So I consulted with her, and she confirmed I was remembering it correctly.

Next problem: I do not have a stove or oven. Grandma Bernice did this in my big old electric skillet—I think we have it still, but I’m not sure where it is. One of the wonderful, heavy ones before they were all lined with Teflon. But I can’t cook two things at once in the cottage without tripping a circuit breaker. So we decided Christian would cook the brisket, and I’d do the scalloped potatoes.

1 brisket, 3.5 - 5 lbs. (partly depends on size of your skillet)

3-4 cloves garlic

Salt, pepper, and paprika

1 good-sized onion, sliced into rings

Beef bouillon

Flour and water

The night before slice garlic cloves into small slivers; make random cuts all over brisket and insert garlic slivers. Rub the meat generously with salt, pepper, and paprika on both sides. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Next morning, slice onion and sauté in vegetable oil (use the skillet you will use for the meat). When onion is soft and translucent, remove to a plate. Using the same oil, sear the meat on both sides. When done, pile the onions on top and add enough bouillon to come almost to the top of the meat.

Cover and cook in a 225 oven for eight hours or simmer in a covered electric skillet. (Christian browned it in his cast iron skillet and then put the whole thing in the oven.).

Let the meat rest while you make gravy. There will be a lot of broth, so you may want to set some aside for another use—like soup. I make gravy the way my mom taught me: take a pint jar with a tight-fitting lid and fill halfway with cold water. Dump in a good amount of flour (you can see how precise this is) and shake like mad till you have a smooth mixture.

Gradually stir flour mixture into broth; bring to a gentle boil and let it thicken, adding more flour and water as needed until you have the consistency you want.

Slice the meat across the grain. Serve gravy alongside.

And the scalloped potatoes? I went back in time for that too, consulting Betty Crocker. I omitted the onions, because Jacob doesn’t like them, and substituted 2 cups cream for part of the 3.5  cups of milk needed. And just before it was done, I spread some grated Parmesan on the top. So good.

Lots of brisket left over. We’ve had it heated with gravy twice, and I’ve had a sandwich of cold roast on rye (good Jewish rye from the deli, of course) with mayonnaise. We’ll do this again soon.

Those molded salads from the Sixties

I’ve been reading Helen Corbitt cookbooks lately and am struck by the contrast between what she cooked at Neiman’s in the Sixties and our dietary tastes today. (For those that don't know, Corbitt ran the Neiman Marcus kitchens from 1955 to 1969 and left an indelible and delicious stamp on them.) Her appetizers recipes are heavy with oysters—I don’t know anyone who serves oysters in the home these days. If you eat them—and that’s a big if—they are restaurant fare. Lots of cream and butter, but none of the Middle Eastern influence we see today and very little Asian.

But what strikes me most is her several recipes for molded salads and even entrees. Molded sounds better than gelatin, but whatever you call them, we rarely serve them today. I grew up eating a salad of grated carrot, canned pineapple, and maybe nuts—not sure—in orange Jello. When I was raising kids, I frequently made a jellied gazpacho, using tomato juice or beef bouillon as the base. Corbitt offers recipes for fruit salads, chicken mousse, ham mousse, cranberry mold, etc. The only one I don’t think I’d try is prune—and I like prunes. She also has advice on layering, etc.—some fruits sink, some float, and your salad will be prettier is you know which does what. She cautions never use fresh pineapple in a jellied salad--the jelly won't stiffen.

One molded chicken dish that I loved came from an older friend, now gone, who sort of adopted me. We met because my then-husband and I looked at a house that we could no more afford than the man in the moon. She was the real estate agent, and, long story short, we rented a house owned by one of her sons and got to know her and her younger son. For years, on the birthday of one of my children, Carolyn Burk would call to let me know she was thinking of me.

She taught me to make chicken loaf. It’s a great summer dish, the purest chicken flavor I’ve ever tasted. I never can remember which one in my family likes it, but I well know that my older daughter despises it as “too gelatinous.” Being chicken, it doesn’t keep too many days but freezes well. Once you defrost, you have to eat within a day or two, so I often slice leftovers and freeze separately.

I never had written directions for this, so here goes, from the top of my head. You need,

One old hen

One sleeve saltine crackers

Salt and pepper

Maybe a bit of chicken bouillon

Maybe a bit of Knox gelatin

Boil that old hen until it’s tender. You might add a bouillon cube or tsp. of condensed flavoring (Better Than Bouillon) to give more flavor to your broth.

Reserve the broth. Skin and bone the chicken and dice the meat finely. Carolyn used to do it with scissors (if I remember correctly, she had her husband trained to do it with scissors too). That’s too labor intensive. I do small batches in the food processor at chop setting, turning it off and on. You don’t want to mince or fine grind it; you want small pieces.

Do use the food processor to make crumbs of the crackers. Mix with chicken. Salt and pepper to taste, remembering that the saltines already are salted. Stir in just enough broth to bind the mixture together. Do NOT let it get mushy.

This is the tricky part. Carolyn never added gelatin; my mom, who became a fan of the recipe, did. When she stirred in the broth, she added an envelope of gelatin dissolved in some of the broth. You don’t want to make it too “gelatinous”—Megan’s word—but you want it to hold together. I usually add the gelatin.

Pack this into a loaf pan and cover with plastic wrap. Set a second pan on top and weigh it down with a couple of canned goods. Refrigerate overnight.

Next day carefully run a table knife around edges to loosen the loaf. Put a plate on top of it and gently turn upside down. If you’re lucky, the loaf will slide out; you may have to prod with that knife but be gentle and careful.

Makes a lovely summer platter with tomato wedges, hard-boiled or deviled eggs, lettuce, maybe diced scallions. Pass mayonnaise or perhaps your favorite blue cheese dressing—or even tonnato sauce. (See Gourmet on a Hot Plate for tonnato sauce.)

And don’t be too quick to dismiss molded salads and even entrees.

Spring is coming--time to think about composed salads

A couple of warm days hint that spring really will come again, even though the world seems out of whack. And that means it’s time to think about main dish salad—or composed salads.

No, composed salads are not jellied, not that pineapple and grated carrots that your mom used to do with orange Jello. Composed salads are simply salads where the ingredients are laid out on a plate instead of tossed in a bowl. Traditionally when you serve them at home, you lay the ingredients out on one large platter. Diners help themselves, but we all know that self-service can get kind of messy. For a small crowd—two to four—I sometimes serve individual salads laid out in a soup plate. You can dress the individual dishes or pass a small pitcher of dressing.

The nice thing about them is you can use almost any ingredients that strike your fancy. There are, however, two basic composed salads familiar to everyone who has ever had lunch in a bistro café. Both of these are often served on a bed of lettuce.

Cobb salad

Cobb salad started in the 1930s at the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood. Owner Bob Cobb went prowling in his restaurant’s refrigerator for leftovers, arranged them on a plate, drizzled French dressing over the dish, and there it was. Within days it was on the menu

Traditional ingredients are cold chicken breast, often diced, tomato (cherry tomatoes are good), green beans, tiny potatoes, cheese (sometimes blue, sometimes cheddar), avocado, bacon bits, sometimes artichoke hearts.

Cobb used French dressing on his salad but use your imagination. I think a good vinaigrette is nice because it accents the flavor of the ingredients without overwhelming them. But restaurants frequently offer a choice, so feel free to use ranch, blue cheese, Italian, honey-mustard, whatever suits.

Salade Niçoise

Whereas Cobb features chicken, salade Niçoise is built around tuna. I like to do it with high quality canned albacore in water.

Olives are also traditional, but I omit them because olives are on the short list of things I just don’t eat. But tiny baby potatoes, peeled, boiled, and cut in quarters if necessary, green beans, hard-boiled eggs are all common. I sometimes add asparagus.

Here’s a vinaigrette that I frequently use (enough for two individual salads):

Scant quarter cup chives, or substitute tops only of scallions

2 Tbsp. white wine vinegar

1 small shallot, roughly chopped

½ tsp. honey   

½ tsp. Dijon mustard

½ cup vegetable oil

2 Tbsp. olive oil

Put it all in the food processor and whirl until greens are absorbed into dressing.

When the potatoes are warm, pour a small bit of vinaigrette on them. Also dress the greens lightly that you use on the plate. Drizzle remaining dressing over the salad.

The following two dressings are good on Cobb salads or salade Noicoise as well as a plain green salad.

Avocado salad dressing

1 lg. avocado, soft, ready to use; peeled and cut into chunks; it’s a good idea to mash it with a fork to make it easier to blend; if you don’t, chunks keep reappearing.

2 tsp. lemon juice

½ cup. Greek yogurt

Hot sauce to taste--I sprinkle a few drops

1/4 cup olive oil

2 garlic cloves

3/4 tsp. salt

Throw it all in the food processor.

Creamy blue cheese salad dressing

2 Tbsp. each mayonnaise, sour cream, and buttermilk

1 tsp. lemon juice

¼ tsp. pepper

¼ tsp. Kosher salt

1 anchovy fillet, mashed (optional)

Blue cheese – 2-3 Tbsp. to taste

1 finely chopped scallion

Mix all ingredients, adding cheese and scallion last. If dressing is too thick, sparingly add more buttermilk.

This is classic for wedge salads but also good on torn leaf lettuce and any number of other good things.

Cooking from the pantry

A friend wrote that she was not liking her own cooking in isolation, so she and her husband were resorting to take-out. It made me sad for her, because I am having fun with the challenge of what I can and do fix. Granted, much of the time I’m cooking for just me. We are only getting groceries either delivered or curbside pick-up, and there is a great time lapse between ordering and receiving, so it’s hard to plan. I may run out of ideas, but for now my mind is full of possibilities.

Some essentials: I find it is really important to have sharp cheddar cheese in the fridge and tuna in the pantry. And you always have a meal if  you have eggs:

Here are a few of the things I’ve done:

Baked a huge baked potato and mashed it with chopped green onion, crumbled bacon, grated sharp cheddar, and lots of butter. Re-stuffed the shells, and baked one for dinner one night, one for lunch a day or so later. I laid thinly sliced cheddar over the top of the lunch potato before baking it. Should have taken the picture before I tried to transfer it to a plate.

Made soup out of things I found in the freezer—beans in tomato sauce, orzo pasta, corn, peas, slices of Polish sausages. Made a base of chicken broth and a can of diced tomatoes. When serving (to myself) I topped it with grated Parmesan.

Made tuna salad, after we scored a whole, very fresh loaf of good Jewish rye bread. Next up, I think I’ll do tuna salad, top it with cheese, and bake—a tuna melt. I still intend to make tuna pasties, but that’s a bit of a chore and I find myself getting lazy these days.

Last night, I baked eggs—a new discovery for me, and I loved it. Here’s a sort-of recipe:

½ slice sourdough bread

½ can chopped spinach (fresh would be better, but we don’t have it, so I’m making do)

Grated sharp cheddar

2 eggs

2 tsp. milk

Grease an individual casserole dish thoroughly. Line bottom with torn bread. Layer spinach on next and top with generous amount of cheese. Crack two eggs on top, being careful not to break. Salt and pepper to taste, and cover eggs with the milk so they don’t dry out.

Bake at 350 until eggs are set to your personal taste. I like them runny, so you can stir ingredients together.

Wish I’d thought to take a picture. You can vary the layers as you want—a different vegetable, another type of cheese. .Just use the technique.

A thread on the New York Times Cooking Community Facebook page (that’s a mouthful) had varying opinions on creamed tuna—apparently you either love it or hate it. For me, it’s comfort food, and it’s on my to-make list. Here is another sort-of recipe:

1 or 2 green onions, chopped

1 medium stalk celery, diced

1 Tbsp. butter more or less

1 Tbsp. flour more or less

About 1 cup milk

1 can water-packed albacore tuna, flaked

About a half cup or less petit green peas, defrosted

A splash of white wine

Salt and pepper

For serving: toast, rice, pasta, your choice

            Sauté onion and celery until just soft; sprinkle with flour and stir in thoroughly to make a roux. Slowly add milk, stirring as you do, until you get a sauce of the consistency you want. Add tuna and peas and cook over medium-low until warmed through.

I’m going to put mine on a piece of that good rye bread, toasted.

You can use this same technique for chicken or, even—dare I say it?—chipped beef, though for the latter you might want to omit the peas and wine and season with a dash of Worcestershire. Or maybe red wine? Garlic?

Tonight, smothered chicken thighs because I had them in the freezer from a curbside pickup mistake—thought I was ordering four thighs and got four packs of four thighs each. I'll feed the family. This weekend, when we finally get new groceries, we’re going to make a holiday dinner—turkey and dressing and green beans. Darn! Wish I had French’s onion rings, but crushed potato chips will do.

I think that’s part of cooking in quarantine—making do.

           

Cooking in the time of quarantine

Hard to know what to say or where to begin. We are besieged with the contradictory news of bare grocery shelves and the need to have supplies in case the delivery chain breaks down. Should we use our stored staples or cook with fresh ingredients while we can get them? I know I for one am a bit reluctant to use the few cans of tuna I have because I might need them more lately.

I read on MSNBC this morning that toilet paper will soon be overstocked; pallets will sit in grocery aisles because everyone has stocked up and no one is buying. But, the article cautioned, some foods may be in short supply. Still, there will be plenty to eat; we just may have to adapt our menus.

Possibly, this change in lifestyle and the availability of goods will lead us to a more plant-based diet. One food that will be a staple, in my mind, is beans, beans of all kinds.

On the internet, I read lots of posts about people who are finding comfort in cooking. It’s something we can do while isolated, whether we cook for a family or for ourselves alone. One night this week I made a family staple—King Ranch Chicken. Tuna pasties, always a favorite of mine, are in my planning. But this is also the time to experiment, try new recipes. I have recipes for white bean stew with tomatoes, and I’m looking forward to trying that dish. Last Sunday night. I fixed cheese grits with black beans, avocado, and radishes—straight out of the pages of the New York Times, with thanks to Sam Sifton.

One reason I picked this recipe was that son-in-law Christian loves grits and radishes. He may be the only person I’ve ever met who is so crazy about them. But at dinner, I caught him picking the radishes off his entrée and putting them on his salad. I couldn’t help but ask, and he confessed he liked them best cold, not on a hot dish. So there goes that recipe I cut out for pork chops with roasted radishes. And, frankly, the radishes didn’t do as much for me as they apparently  do for him. So color them optional.

Cheese Grits with black beans

What you need to serve four for a main dish:

Chicken broth – about 3 cups

Whole Milk – 2 cups.

Grits – 1 cup.

Black beans – l large can

Cayenne pepper to taste

Butter – 2 Tbsp.

Avocado – 2, sliced

Radishes – 3, sliced

Any other diced vegetable you want - tomatoes, bell pepper, scallions, celery, etc.

            Make grits by stirring together 2-3/4 cups chicken broth, 2 cups whole milk, and 1 cup grits. Cook over low heat—I used my soup kettle, because grits bubble wildly, even on low, and I didn’t want hot grits on my hands or the wall. Stir this occasionally and after about 25 minutes, you should have a creamy, smooth pot of grits. Take it off the heat and stir in a cup of grated sharp cheddar (the original recipe calls for a half cup, but I like them extra cheesy) and the butter. Stir until thoroughly blended in.

For the black beans: drain and rinse, put in saucepan with remaining ¼ cup chicken broth and the cayenne. Cook to heat and let the sauce thicken a bit. Mash a few beans to make it more of a sauce.

Put the grits in four soup plates, top with beans, and garnish with avocado, those optional radishes, and any other vegetable you choose.

PS: Leftover grits are great for breakfast!

A gourmand experience

Our front row seats right by the kitchen

Know what a gourmand is, as opposed to a gourmet? I once worked with a woman who thought gourmand equated with glutton but not always so: the dictionary tells us a gourmand is a person who enjoys eating, a connoisseur. So, for tonight, for this blog, we’ll ignore the side implications about someone who eats too much and is greedy, because I had a gourmand experience last weekend.

My two daughters, two grandsons, and I met an old friend for dinner at Savor, the laboratory restaurant of the Culinary Institute of America in San Antonio. From start to finish, the meal was outstanding. The restaurant itself was not as imposing as I expected—no white linen tablecloths but bare wooden tables and a sort of sleek modern look and a more casual atmosphere. The kitchen was open so we could look in and watch the budding chefs at work; one of the most fascinating aspects to me was watching them close down the kitchen at the end of the evening. We had front-row seats, right by the kitchen.

Corn soup

risotto

With six of us, we ordered a variety of things. I began with a Caesar salad, followed by corn soup. Several at our table had the risotto, and my oldest daughter had mussels. You could choose either three items or four (the price varied accordingly—the pricing was not expensive, except that between us we consumed a lot of wine which drove the total up considerably).

Mussels

I did not have an entrée, but the two most popular at our table were the tenderloin and the yellowtail. Jacob tried roast pork with pork belly, despite my warning that pork belly is a fancy name for fat. His mother was dismayed at the piece of fat on his plate, and the roast meat was too dry. Otherwise, everyone said their entrees were wonderful.

roast pork

beef tenderloin

The frites we ordered for the table were perfectly seasoned and delectable. It would have been a sin to put ketchup on them, and none of us asked—not even the two thirteen-year-old boys among us.

Frites

For dessert we had tarts, which I somehow didn’t get a picture of.

Throughout, the presentation of every dish was as outstanding as the taste. It truly was a wonderful evening.