Results tagged “salad”

A crunchy salad with great acidity and punch, a good match for heavy, meat-filled autumn stews.  Use different coloured beetroot for an even more beautiful result.  

Recipe and photo from Mia Kristensen of CPH Good Food.

This recipe is just a guide - use whichever vegetables you have to hand and dressing quantities that suit your taste.  This is a great way to use up those winter veg that might otherwise hang around in the fridge too long, and keeps well in the fridge for a couple of days.  Eating them raw makes a refreshing change, too.  The rainbow colours are pretty, and the salad looks stunning served in a bowl lined with the beautiful outer leaves of a large January King cabbage, which are sea green fringed with purple.

Waldorf salad was invented at the very end of the 19th century in New York’s Waldorf Hotel.  Originally it was just celery and apple, dressed well.  Over time other ingredients have been added - walnuts (or pecans), grapes, blue cheese, leaves such as watercress and sometimes chicken breast.  To be quick, you could use shop-bought mayonnaise, or plain yoghurt flavoured with mustard and lemon juice. 

This is a lovely way to use butternut or other sweet orange autumn squashes.  You could omit the red peppers if you like, and use soft, tangy goat’s cheese instead of the Feta.  To spice it up further, roast the squash with a sprinkling of ground cumin, coriander and nutmeg.

This recipe is adapted from ‘Everyday & Sunday recipes from Riverford Farm’ by Jane Baxter and Guy Watson, which is a great cookbook (not least because it contains five of my recipes!).  It is the perfect salad for late spring and early summer, when spinach and broad beans are in season. 

The pomegranate molasses really makes the dish.  Look for it in Middle Eastern and Turkish food shops.  It should be just reduced pure pomegranate juice with nothing added - intensely sweet and sour at the same time, a bit like aged balsamic vinegar.

‘Kemia’ - various salads, often made with cooked vegetables - are served at the start of a Moroccan meal, a bit like tapas in Spain or meze in Turkey.  They are always beautifully presented, to stimulate the appetite, and subtly spiced with classic Moroccan flavours such as mint, parsley, pepper, cumin, cinnamon and citrus.  The beauty for the cook is that you can prepare them all in advance and serve them at room temperature.
 
In Morocco I noticed that cooks almost always scraped the cores out of the carrots once they were boiled.  It’s true that the core may be tougher and less tasty, but normally I don’t bother.  You might think the icing sugar is weird, but this is commonly used in Moroccan salads and the touch of sweetness works really well.  But you can of course leave it out if you wish.

While staying with Erhan Şeker on Turkey’s Aegean coast, we watched in awe as he whipped up dish after dish in front of us in no time at all.  Erhan likes to use plenty of herbs (his aim is to grow all 250 herbs in his ‘Herbs and Spices of the World’ book, and he’s making good progress), and he likes his food to be simple, fast and fresh.  He also loves inventing new dishes and trying them out on passing culinary anthropologists.  

To demonstrate these principles he went out and picked a bunch of fresh oregano, sliced up a couple of small courgettes and had this delicious salad on our plates in what seemed like seconds.  Cooking from scratch does not need to be labour intensive.  I think it would also work well with other herbs, such as basil, parsley or dill.  To keep the flavours simple, I’d just use one herb though, two at the most.

We definitely haven't done Bulgaria justice - we only ended up staying here for two days.  But we've had a fantastic time.  We've seen the sun and the sea for what feels like the first time in months; eaten lots of fish and lots of yoghurt; and discovered the cultural importance of salad and its vital supporting role in the consumption of cigarettes and alcohol.

Our first stop was Nesebar, yet another UNESCO-protected site (they seem to be buying up prime sites everywhere in Eastern Europe - surely it is no coincidence that their name rhymes with Tesco? We suspect some sort of conspiracy).  It's a beautiful little peninsula full of old Byzantine stone churches, blue (Black) sea, fish and - most importantly - salad.  This last factor might not sound very exciting to you, but after a month or so living off preserved pork fat, it seemed pretty revelatory to us.  So at first, we were happy just to eat it, assuming in our innocence that it was simply a foodstuff like any other.  Only when we moved on to the village of Kosti did we find out what it's really for ...