Fruit salad, any day

Every year on Mother’s Day, my daughter used to make fruit salad for me. What a treat — the colors and flavors combining in a joyous medley.

This year, she’s far away, but I’ll still be eating fruit salad tomorrow morning. Why not? Who says you have to wait for a holiday or for someone else to make it for you? Fruit salad is great any time — healthful and delicious.

And there are countless variations to suit your taste. I like it with the simplest of dressings — a little lemon juice, some zest and a bit of sugar — or none at all. You can add other flavorings, spices, or vanilla; you can serve with yogurt or sour cream or crème fraiche; you can put nuts or dried fruit in your fruit salad, or whatever you like. 

As spring turns to summer, the choices for fresh ripe fruit increase, of course, but at this time of year I still rely on one of my all-time beloved fruits, the pineapple.  As one of my friends pointed out, if you consider the cost per pound of a pineapple, it is one of the best fruit bargains. (I have written two pineapple posts on this blog — here‘s one of them.)

Happy Fruit Salad Day to you!

Old friends and new

Blackberry-blueberry jam, an attempt to get the blackberry flavor with fewer seeds.

I MARKED THE 8TH ANNIVERSARY OF THIS BLOG, by picking a tub of wild blackberries and making a blackberry cobbler. The first post that I wrote here, in 2009, was about the culmination of eight blackberry cobblers (!) that I made that summer. Well, I only made one this summer, but I can report that the recipe still holds up well and is suitable for any kind of berry. Cobbler and Blueberry Boy Bait are old friends during berry season, recipes I can count on–so familiar I can almost make them by instinct.

Speaking of instinct, my dear friend Martha and I read a post touching on this subject in one of our favorite food blogs, Juls’ Kitchen, written by Giulia, a cook and writer in Tuscany (We read it in the Italian version first, as we’re studying the language and she writes so well.) She wrote about making a cake by instinct — and it made me think about the dishes that I make instinctively, or almost so.

Since it’s summer, and I’m enjoying my small crop of cherry tomatoes and basil, grown in pots, one of the simplest and best pasta dishes came to mind — an easy one to make by instinct. I cut the tomatoes in half, add some garlic and a dash of salt, and cook them down a bit to release their juices. Then I add a little of the cooking water from the pasta, toss in a good dose of chopped basil, stir the cooked, drained pasta into the skillet, and sprinkle with grated Parmeggiano or Pecorino Romano. Done. The best old friend of the late summer menu: I can never have too much of it.

Leftover wild salmon, leftover rice, chopped cucumber and cherry tomatoes, corn kernels, chopped green onion, cilantro and a dressing of lime juice with a little oil and salt.

Summer, with its bounty of vegetables, is also such a great time to compose salads. I don’t know if there is an art to this, but I think there is something of an instinct, developed over time, of putting foods together so they marry well. Contrasts of color, flavor and texture work well in a composed salad. Leftovers and seasonal specials are equally welcome. It’s not that my instinct is always so great–some salads I’ve made did not marry well — in fact, probably needed to divorce! But usually, my instincts are not too bad and the ingredients get along pretty well — even complementing each other.

Especially in the lazy days of summer, I tend to forget what I can put together for a simple meal, and I need inspiration from something I’ve seen or read, which I can then adapt to what I have.  The salad above that was like that — I was just reading about a lime-juice salad dressing, and then put this together from leftovers and farmers’ market produce.

Then, as I was sorting through photos for this post, I looked at the photo of this salad and realized I could make it again for today’s lunch, even though I was missing the rice and had more cucumber. Avocado would be nice in this salad too, or black beans, or red pepper.  You could make it vegan without the salmon. You could use parsley instead of cilantro if you are one of the 4-to-14 percent of the population that thinks cilantro tastes like soap. You could add some sesame seeds or nuts on top .  . .

There are as many salad variations as there are mathematical combinations of vegetables with grains, beans, protein, what have you. Here’s a post with some of my late-summer favorites from seasons past: https://tobykitchen.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/salads-salads-salads/.

Have fun, eat well and stay cool,
Toby

Hmmmm, shall I make a blackberry focaccia as I did this time last year? https://tobykitchen.wordpress.com/2016/07/19/blackberry-supper/

Blackberry supper

BLACKBERRY SEASON is making me a little nostalgic. Blog-nostalgic, that is (though I still think blog is a particularly ugly word), as I wrote my first post on Toby’s Kitchen Notes nearly seven years ago, toward the end of berry season, with my recipe for Blackberry Cobbler No. 8.

It seems hard to believe I’d made eight versions of blackberry cobbler in 2009, but I did, along with some other must-have fruit desserts. This year, as I write, it’s just the beginning of blackberry season, and the other day I had a couple freshly picked pints on hand. I really wanted to bake something with them — but not a dessert. Aha — it remembered Nigel Slater’s marvelous recipe: Blackberry focaccia.

Blackberry focaccia has only a hint of sweetness, from sugar sprinkled atop the dough.

Half the recipe would be plenty, I figured, as there were only two of us eating it, and it doesn’t keep well for leftovers. (I wrote of this before, so the recipe is here.)

The yeast dough is easy, but does need gentle handling, especially when you fold in half the berries after the first rising. The rest of the berries are strewn on top; then, it rises again and you drizzle olive oil and sprinkle demerara or sparkling sugar on top.

Once out of the oven and cooled just a bit, you can sprinkle with confectioners sugar if you like.

We had a choice: ruin our appetites by devouring the focaccia immediately or wait a few minutes, make a green salad, and call it supper.

We chose the latter — and it wasn’t a sacrifice. Calling it supper gave it a certain sense of legitimacy, if not outright virtue.  (More nutritious than pancakes with syrup for supper, anyway.) And yes, it was delicious. I plan to repeat this combo!

Whatever. . .

WHATEVER IS FRESH  — from your garden or your neighbor’s garden, from a farmers’ market,  fruit-and-vegetable stand, u-pick farm or along a path, growing edible and wild — well, that’s what you should be eating right now.

For me, the vegetables and herbs lately include tender carrots and stringbeans (green or yellow), tiny new potatoes, nice little cauliflowers, fresh garlic, cherry tomatoes, basil, parsley, tarragon and mint. And summer fruit: Bluecrop blueberries that I picked at a wonderful organic blueberry farm (Yes, I may have to make the seasonal favored coffeecake, Blueberry Boy Bait ), blackberries from the bushes that grow wild here, and melons — watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew — from a produce stand.

My July salad: tiny potatoes, green and yellow stringbeans, carrots, cherry tomatoes and green onions in a mustard-vinaigrette

What to do with them? Well, it’s a theme I keep coming back to — salad. It doesn’t require much cooking, and it’s perfect for summer eating — lunch, dinner, picnics, road trips, snacks. . .

Here are a couple of my favorite previous posts about summer salad, for more ideas:

Salads, salads salads

Summer’s salad days

A plum welcome to summer

I HAVE WRITTEN BEFORE about the marvelous Santa Rosa plums of early summer, and my gratitude to Luther Burbank for developing them. But again I feel the need to praise these plums. If I were to have just one fruit tree, it might have to be a Santa Rosa plum, not only for their deliciousness at the start of summer, but also because they are so hard to find in the market.

I had enough, briefly, to eat plenty of plums au naturel and to make British cookbook writer Nigel Slater’s brilliant plum tabbouleh. (I did substitute a pinch of crushed red pepper for the small red chile he calls for). I even made some plum crumble with a topping of butter, brown sugar, flour and hazelnuts.

The plum tabbouleh drew me back to one of my favorite books, Ripe: A Cook in the Orchard, and to Nigel Slater’s lovely homage to plums.

“When I find the perfect plum, jelly-fleshed and incandescently ripe, its golden skin flashed with crimson freckles, I make a great fuss of it,” he writes. “I have even been known to get out a small plate and a napkin. I eat slowly, imagining time stopped. More usually, I come across such a fruit without warning, having little alternative but to eat it from the hand, spitting the pit into the long grass below.”

And why are these plums so hard to find? Although Slater is speaking of Britain and not of Santa Rosa plums, I think his sentiments could apply to the U.S. as well.

“It breaks my heart to think of the plum orchards we have lost in the last two decades,” he writes, “but what else can a farmer do when the crop is no longer profitable, consumers have more interest in peaches and nectarines, and the stores continue to sell imports even during our own brief season? I salute the British plum grower.”

Well, I salute all plum growers, and in particular my friends John and Cathy who gave me the pleasure of a few days full of plums from their Santa Rosa plum tree. What a happy welcome to summer!

Taste of Sicilia

As we’re getting ready for a trip to Sicily, I was reading through a little travel journal I kept from a visit there eight years ago, when I went to research lemons. I came across this page with a tuna-lemon-olive oil salad with artichoke hearts and green beans that I made in a lemon orchard agriturismo above Sicily’s Lemon Riviera, on the eastern side of the island (we are going there again!). We usually had a kitchen in Sicily, so we could shop in the markets, and we ate some variation of this salad nearly every day we were there — and with tuna so good and produce so fresh and delicious, we never tired of it.

This salad (with variations) became a standard once we were home, too. You may have to substitute Meyer lemons or preserved lemons for the Sicilian lemon if you want to eat the lemon peel, but otherwise –except for the gorgeous views of Mount Etna and the Mediterranean — it translates well, especially in the spring.

I’m sure we always had bread or breadsticks with “My Sicilian lemon insalata (good for il prazo–lunch–or antipasta). The bottom line reads: “good with Etna red or white, iced tea or lemonade.”

Shortcut salad

 

I had a head of cauliflower that was calling out to be roasted, so I took out a cookie sheet, set the oven to 400 degrees and cut off the woody parts of the vegetable. Then I broke and cut the cauliflower florets into small pieces, mixed them with a bit of olive oil and salt and spread them on the sheet, roasting until they were browning and a little crispy on the edges. That brings out and mellows the flavor of the cauliflower.

It would be easy to gobble up a whole head of cauliflower that way, but I resisted as I needed those tasty florets to go a little further.  I had in mind using them to make a nice healthy salad that I could put in the fridge so we could eat it for lunch or a snack.

Hmmm, wouldn’t it be good to have some chewy nutty farro as a base? –and some roasted peppers for color and flavor? Farro, an ancient strain of hard wheat, isn’t difficult to cook, but it does take a bit of time, and I just happened to have Trader Joe’s 10-minute farro on hand, as well as a jar of roasted yellow and red peppers.

I am usually reluctant to admit that I use some shortcuts, but that is pretty silly. Why not use shortcuts if the ingredients are healthy and they make your life a little easier?

The finished salad also had chopped green onion, parsley and mint and a dressing made of my favorite trio: lemon juice, olive oil and salt.

Variations? Of course! You could add beans, a different grain, a different vegetable, other herbs, vinegar in place of lemon, etc. etc. In fact, I had some leftover salad and I added sliced Kalamata olives, some pickled beets (also from a jar) and more lemon juice to freshen it up — and the second variation was good too.

I just wish I always had a vegetable-based salad or soup in the fridge for the best healthy fast food. It’ll probably never happen, but if shortcuts help me toward that goal, I’m all for them!

Al fresco

It’s well into August and the farmer’s market is bursting with pretty much everything. We finally got some rain here last week, which made the farmers really happy.

Everything is fresh, beautiful and tasty!

With all these fresh selections, I’ve still been mostly in the salad mode, which has the great advantage of using little or no heat.

I’ve  even had enough Sun Gold cherry tomatoes and basil from my own teeny garden to make a Caprese salad (with fresh mozzarella).

And occasionally I have turned on the stove or the oven, to make pasta with roasted or sauteed tomatoes and basil — or pizza with those same ingredients. (Mmmm, it had been such a long time since I had pizza.) And green salad alongside, of course.

Another great way to eat your salad is in a fresh spring roll — also called summer roll or salad roll.

I’d never made these before but it turns out to be pretty simple — just a lot of chopped salad ingredients (plus some thin Asian noodles — I used brown rice ones), some shrimp or chicken or tofu if you like, and the spring roll skins, which are briefly soaked in hot water, then rolled around the filling like a burrito. You can find instructions here and many other places on the Web, and adapt them as you see fit. And make or buy a nice sauce to dip them in.

Also,  all the marvelous fresh fruit this time of year makes it easier to eat a little lighter than usual. We’ve really been enjoying a simple dessert lately: a bowl of fruit with a nice dollop of maple-sweetened yogurt. Sitting outside on a warm evening with a slab of watermelon or a juicy fresh peach is appealing too.

But I really couldn’t let August go by without baking at least one Blueberry Boy Bait! I made it when we had some company coming, and it was a fitting afternoon treat.

Freddie and Val sample the Blueberry Boy Bait

And what better way to enjoy it, as with so many of these meals and snacks,  than al fresco — the perfect summer way to dine!

Summer’s salad days

Farro, asparagus, navy beans and chives

Summer is certainly salad season, with its rich selection of fresh vegetables and herbs. Nearly every salad I make has a simple basic dressing: olive oil, lemon juice and salt. Sometimes I use another oil (a little walnut oil, perhaps?) or vinegar or even lime instead of the lemon, and sometimes I add a little mustard, garlic, lemon zest  or Parmesan to the dressing — but I never get tired of the basic threesome of oil, lemon and salt! Here are some of the salads we’ve been enjoying recently.

Karen’s chives

It’s so nice to have fresh herbs in the garden (or in a pot). These chives belong to my generous next-door neighbor, Karen, who lets me cut all I want. I’m growing thyme, oregano, tarragon, mint, basil and dill, and they often find their way into my salads.

My basil harvest

Broccoli, potato, red pepper, basil

Potatoes, rapini, carrots and dill

Many of the vegetables are from the farmers’ market or fruit and vegetable stands.

Rapini looks like broccoli tops but is actually a member of the turnip family. Go figure.

Here’s a good article about how the Italians cook rapini.

Green salad with sockeye salmon, eggs, beets, cannellini beans and fresh herbs.

It was difficult to save a piece of the Copper River salmon from dinner the night before, but we restrained ourselves and had this great salad for lunch the next day.

Tuna with cannellini beans, preserved lemon and green onions, on lettuce. Tasted better than it looks.

I see I’ve been making a lot of salads with white beans, cannellini if I can find good ones, or navy beans.

It’s not much trouble (but takes a little planning) to soak them overnight in some salty water, then drain the next day, cover with cold unsalted water,  a bay leaf and a  couple cloves of garlic and cook until tender. But it’s easier and also fine to use canned beans.

Broccoli, white beans, and red onions

And today’s lunch: The salad was black beans (from a can) and corn kernels, with chopped red onion, raw chard, a little bit of chicken and lots of cilantro and lime. It was nicely set off with a corn-flour tortilla and a couple of slices of melon.

I’ve also been making some salads with bulgur as well as classic cucumber salads with vinegar, dill, salt and a touch of sugar. I just bought some beautiful green beans, fennel and purple carrots from the farmers’ market. . . so I am thinking about the next salads.

Let the vegetables be the inspiration. Purple carrots with orange insides would look great with a deep green of broccoli or green beans.

What salads have you been making? Happy 4th of July and enjoy these salad days of summer!

Also see:
Salads, salads, salads (and a riot of color)
Road trip salads

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beets and potatoes (and grandmothers from Russia)

A few days ago, I was talking on the phone with my cousin Yael–an Israeli, though she’s lived in the United States for decades now–about the traditional foods we had on Passover.

Our grandmothers were sisters — from the village of Shumsk (or Szumsk) in Russia (though sometimes the region was part of Poland and currently it’s part of the Ukraine) — and Yael and I discovered that both of us grew up with potatoes on the seder plate, either instead of parsley or alongside it. Why? Because in Russia (or Poland or Ukraine or whatever) there were no fresh vegetables growing in April.

I found radishes at the farmers market here, but it might still be too early for them in the Ukraine. Or Russia. Or Poland.

Passover foods generally involve a lot of potatoes, but beets are also traditional, especially for Jews from Eastern Europe, as it was another root vegetable available in early spring.

Yael told me about a sweet-sour beet salad she makes for Passover, and that reminded me of beet borscht. On Passover, my mother always served it a special way with an egg whipped in the soup tureen, turning the borscht from wine-red to a frothy deep rose color. Yael’s family made it that way too, she said.

Baba (Edess Kanfer Arshack)

My mother told me that her mother (my Baba) always made rossel (or rossl or rosel), which is sour or fermented beets, a kind of starter for genuine beet borscht.  She started the fermentation six weeks before Passover, putting cleaned and peeled chunks of beets in an earthenware crock and covering them with water, checking every few days. The women neighbors in Rock Island, Illinois, where my mother’s family lived, would come to the house and take a cupful of Baba’s rossel so they could make their own borscht.

Looking around the Internet, I noticed a couple of things about rossel. For a long while it fell out of favor as it takes quite a bit of planning and some attention. (Even my mother, who kept so many food traditions, never made it.) Plus people’s tastes had changed and sour fermented beets didn’t sound so appealing –although kosher dill pickles, which are fermented cucumbers, never lost their fans.

But recently, it’s having a bit of a come-back (though one couldn’t exactly call it a resurgence) as fermented foods are becoming more popular. Now I am seriously thinking of making rossel next year (my Jewish cookbook says three or four weeks ahead is sufficient), and perhaps some of my trusty readers will try it too. As Levy‘s bakery famously said, “You don’t have to be Jewish . . .”

In the meantime, I tried Yael’s beet salad with lemon juice and a touch of sugar, which captured the flavors of our shared history.

It made me think of the freedom our grandparents found when they left the Old Country, and that, along with the marvelous color, made me happy.

The ship that my grandmother took to America

Sweet-and-sour beet salad

Yael boils the beets. I baked them, wrapped tightly in tin foil, on a cookie sheet. Either way, if they’re large, they’ll take a while.

(By the way, I first removed the beet greens and steamed them, for another use. Don’t throw them away!)

When the beets are cool, you peel them and grate them. I think next time, I will under-bake them just a little. These were a bit too soft.

Once they’re grated, add lemon juice, sugar (I’d go easy on that) and a little salt, to taste.
There are many ways you could serve this salad, of course, but I thought it looked nice against the green of romaine lettuce leaves. You could fold the leaves around the salad and eat it as a finger food. It looks like a new Passover tradition for me!

For more on beets: A valentine vegetable

For more about Passover:
Edible, tangible memory
A cake for all seasons
Time for quinoa