07/02/2007

In the Kitchen

Make the most of salad days of summer

By Sally Ketchum
Local columnist
ketchum1985@
gmail.com

Read Sally's past columns here

I think there is a bit of youth in all of us during the summer.

I love the way Shakespeare put it, "Salad days, when I was green ... ” Every summer I feel more youthful and every summer I think salads, I eat salads and I write about salads.

I've been reading a book, "American Food Writing.” It was a birthday present from my California son, a budding gourmand.

It's particularly stupendous to any food writer. With 753 pages of fine print, it covers 145 American food writers. The writing is literary quality. There are recipes for some entries, but I doubt that you or I would want to cook many of them.

There is only one recipe for salads. It is for — ta-da — "Perfection Salad,” a Jell-O salad! Surely, those lovely green, vegetable and fruit mixes deserve more attention.

We're familiar with mixed greens, garden salads, vegetable salads/slaws, featured ingredient salads, layered salads, meat or seafood salads and many other types, including those constantly going into the bowl by inventive home cooks.

Most vegetables can be added to green salads. Hard vegetables like carrots, cabbage and fennel bulbs are best julienned/matchsticked. Others — radishes or onions sliced or chopped or peas and olives — are just left alone. A family cook knows her family's favorite vegetables and fruits, and nuts, seeds and croutons, too.

I often opt for a composed salad, like Salade Nicoise, (literally, salad in the style of Nice, France). Ingredients include tomatoes, black olives, anchovies, garlic, green beans (thin fillet type/haricot verts), onions, tuna, hard-cooked eggs and herbs. I love "composing” these salads a different way each time I make them, the large chunks of tuna at 6 o'clock on the plate, small piles of olives, chopped onions and anchovies fillets at 12 o'clock, egg slices and tomato wedges next at 1 and 2 o'clocks, and so on. It's an edible quilt, I think.

The chef at Hollywood's Brown Derby restaurant supposedly invented the American Cobb Salad more than 50 years ago. A Cobb Salad is composed of slightly overlapping rows of, some greens, leaves of Bibb lettuce and chopped watercress are classic, though any pretty lettuce will do. Then, row by row on the plate, slices of avocado, cooked chicken or turkey breast, cooked and crumbled bacon, hard-cooked eggs, sliced tomatoes and crumbled blue cheese are added.

What salad for when? It's the cook's option, studied or capricious. Besides favorites, the season, the occasion and ambience are things to think about. Easy as they are to make, a composed red salad that I had concocted for a Christmas feast for five couples proved "pride goeth before a fall.” I arranged red grapes in red lettuce cups, spiraled pinkish-red grapefruit sections on one side of the plate, then fanned sliced pickle beets fanned along the other.

The salad turned formal into funny. The men didn't like the beets. (Yes, the taste of the beets did clash with the other ingredients.) So during this convivial meal, the wives watched intently for an unobserved moment to fork the beets from their husbands' salad and vice-versa.

The gentlemen were quick to get the ploy and surreptitiously stabbed the beets off their salads and slipped them to the lady next to them. The "hot potato” passing became so apparent that finally, I said, smiling, "I should have left the beets out.”

On very busy days for both He-Who-Must-Be-Fed and me, I ask him to snack through breakfast and lunch. I make a huge salad — the works — on a dinner plate and keep it in the fridge, nibbling at it all day as I am hungry. Then we eat dinner together, and with another salad as a side.

Some salad ingredients make natural combinations. Here are some I've discovered: cucumber and smoked salmon; walnuts, apples and blue cheese; cooked eggplant, capers and olives; tomato and mozzarella; crab and avocado; lobster and asparagus; hard sausage and slaw; chicken, green grapes and water chestnuts; lima beans, tomatoes and bacon; whole garbanzo beans in slaw; grapes, apples and cheese; strawberries, melon and avocado; and room temperature pasta with olives and anchovies.

Mix and match salads, enjoy the toss. Summer is our salad days.

4th of July Slaw

Combine:

• 6 c. shredded cabbage
• 1 c. cherry tomatoes, halved
• 12 sticks cooked bacon, crumbled
• 1/2 blue cheese
• 1 c. favorite slaw dressing

Serve chilled. Makes six portions

— Allrecipes.com

Sally Ketchum is mainly an omnivore, but a large salad on a dinner plate will please her any time. Her latest trick is to shred Florence fennel (an anise-tasting bulb fennel) into slaw. It's easy to grow, and the pale bulbs are usually available at supermarkets with extensive produce shelves. Ketchum can be reached at ketchum1985@gmail.com.