Anne Leith's awesome salad

I think that is basically the best name for this salad. Its a salad, in that there are vegetables in it, but it could also be an appetizer (served with bread) or a full meal (served with more bread). I added more stuff to Anne's base salad, and changed the dressing due to a lack of some crucial ingredients (soy sauce), but any time you mix avocados with perfect heirloom tomatoes, its hard to go wrong.

I really meant to take a photo with the blurry iphone, but I didn't bring it, and its not like there was any left over. Use your imaginations, and then make it for yourself, you will not be disappointed. I don't have an Ed-rating for this, since he wasn't here to devour it with me, but I do have an Ali-, Gail-, and Peter-rating, and it passed with flying colors for all of them.

Anne's awesome salad (+ Alex's changes)
Served four, as a side course

1 avocado
2 perfectly ripe heirloom tomatoes - go for the best quality you can find, here.
Basil leaves
~1/4lb marinated mozzarella balls
~10 kalamata olives
1-2C chopped spinach
1/2 cucumber
Dressing, or a nice pesto in lieu of dressing
Salt, to taste

Your serving dish for this should be wide and flat - to showcase the beauty of this salad. It can be made in a bowl, but looks nicer when on a serving dish. The spinach and cucumber aren't part of Anne's original salad, and don't really do anything except add more green stuff to round out the total volume to feed four people...

Coarsely chop the spinach, and put that down as your first layer. Peel the cucmber and cut that into slices, put that on top of the spinach, that is your second layer. Slice the tomato (use a really sharp knife) into rounds, and lay those on top of the salad. Sprinkle on some salt. Slice the avocado, and layer that on top of the tomato. Slice the mozzarella rounds into 3-4 slices, sprinkle those on top, then halve the olives lengthwise, and sprinkle those on top too. Chiffonnade the basil - the more the better, but I didn't want to kill Barry the basil plant by taking too many of his leaves this early. Salt the whole thing gently.

The dressing was mostly olive oil. An oily pesto would work well too, and Anne swears by soy sauce on her avocados.

Dressing:
Makes far more than you need at once

1/2 onion
1 clove garlic
1 red pepper
dried herbs of your choosing
a couple pieces of lime rind
juice of a lime
Olive oil to fill a 1C tupperware

The idea here is to let the oil steep in the flavors of the dressing, and then just drizzle the oil on top. Use a tupperware as your mixing bowl/storage container, then you can have flavored oil for other salad dressings, too. So smart. Chop the onion, garlic, and pepper - if you want it really spicy, keep the seeds, otherwise discard them. Put everything into a tupperware, add the oil until its all covered, put on the lid and shake to combine. Let it sit for at least an hour, then shake before serving, and serve with a spoon, to drizzle the oil over the salad.

Make this salad.

New Twist

So, I've started grad school. This means that my salary has taken a hit, I now make about half what I'm used to. Of course so far its been pretty easy going, and I get an education out of it, so I'm not complaining, but I've had to tighten my budget a bit. Belts can stay loose. So, I think this blog might head towards the $/week variety. I'm trying to keep myself on $25-30/week, but of course I don't really count weekends since I sort of assume Ed won't let me go too hungry, although he did suggest that I go hunt some rabbits for us last night. We ended up eating pretzels instead. That is probably not a good thing.

Anyway, I think I'm going to blog about what I buy and what I make out of it. I might just revert again to using this as online recipes, but we'll see how it morphs.

I stopped by Sunset farm stand during lunch (ach, I should know not to go shopping on an empty stomach...), and then hit up the Big Y (local supermarket) to round out the week's goodies. It was kind of expensive because I'm bringing a salad to Ali's tonight, and I wanted to make an avocado-tomato-basil-mozzarella salad, and those are expensive ingredients. Oh well, its delicious and healthy, therefore worth it! Tasty, healthy, cheap - gotta get at least two of the three...

Sunset farm:
$3 - 3lb tomatoes
$1.25 - chard and kale
$0.50 - some sort of yellow winter squash
$2 - musk melon
$2 - heavy bag of small potatoes
$1 - two beautiful striped zucchinis
$0.25 - two cute little hot red peppers. They're round. Not sure what kind, or how hot they are.
Total: $10

Big Y
$3.00 - kalamata olives and marinated mozzarella balls for salad (~1/2lb)
$0.56 - 2 bananas
$0.34 - 1 lime
$0.69 - 1 cucumber
$1.44 - crimini mushrooms
$1.50 - bag of spinach
$3.00 - 2 avocados
$1.98 - a basil plant - I have high hopes for this little guy, I'm going to transplant him to a big pot, and water him, and put him in the sunlight, and not eat all of his photosynthesizing surfaces all at once, and I'll name him Barry the Basil plant. Usually I kill my basil plants early on in life by removing and eating all their leaves. Barry will live.
$1.39 - pumpkin muffin. This turned into lunch, with a tomato. Not so good on the healthy side of things... whoops.
Total: $13.90

Total total: $23.90

I suppose I should add another disclaimer which involves the stuff already in my pantry/freezer - that's getting used for stuff, and I no longer have any idea how much it cost. So, it'll bring the total up to some unknown value. But I think this is a good project. Lets see how long I keep it up!

Ratatouille pizza

I had half the pizza dough from last time in the freezer, so I decided to use it up with some of the veggies I'd just gotten from the little farm stand by the university. I decided that a ratatouille-like combination of veggies would be good, so I sliced everything thinly and layered it over some of the basil hummus/pesto stuff and under some ricotta salata. Which you could make on your own, all it takes is milk and lemon juice, but the small block of it at the store only cost me $3.36, and I only used half.

The dough was my standard pizza dough:
1C lukewarm water
1 tbs yeast
1 tbs sugar
1/4C olive oil
1 tbs salt
~3C flour

Dissolve the yeast and sugar into the water, and once the yeast is proofed, mix in everything else. Keep adding flour a cup at a time, until the dough is dry enough to knead with your hands. Knead for 5-10 minutes, then let it rest on a floured surface while you prep the veggies.

This dough freezes really well - I used a version that had been frozen for a couple weeks, and that really made it stretchy, so I could stretch the pizza crust rather than roll it out. Something about gluten continuing to develop even in the freezer? I wouldn't know, talking out of my ass.

Ratatouille pizza
1/4 of a medium-sized eggplant
1/4 of a zucchini
1/4 of a summer squash
1 tomato
~1/2C pesto, optional
~1C crumbled ricotta salada
Kosher salt
pizza dough

Slice the veggies very thinly. Salt both sides of them, and let them sit for 10 minutes, or more if you have time. Do this with the tomato, too. This pulls out some of the water, and keeps them from making the pizza crust soggy.

While they sit there sweating, you can roll out the pizza dough. Mine was enough to fill a regular-sized cookie sheet. Once you've rolled/stretched/cajoled your pizza dough into a large enough shape, sprinkle some coarse cornmeal onto the pan, then gently put the dough down, stretching to make it fit the corners. For a 3C batch of dough, half the batch stretched to a full sheet makes a very thin-crusted pizza. That is how I like it, but some people (ahem. Ed.) like thicker crusts. In their cases, I'd use all the dough in one pan.

Spread pesto over the pizza. I used up some of that pesto/hummus stuff I'd made. If you don't have pesto, I'd recommend at least spreading some olive oil over the crust, it'll just make things taste better.

By now the veggies should be done sweating. Rinse them in a colander, then dry them with a towel. Yeah, its weird, but it keeps the dough from getting soggy. Spread the towel out on a counter, lay a batch of rinsed veggies on the towel, then put another towel on top and push down to extract more water. Do this for all the veggies. Yeah, it'll take 5 minutes, but its worth it.

Layer the sliced veggies over the pesto, in whatever artistic manner you feel like adopting. I did rows of different veggies. Sprinkle some more olive oil on top of that. Crumble the ricotta on top.

Bake at 500F for 10-20 minutes. Depends on the thickness of the crust. The cheese should be slightly browned on top when you pull out the pizza. Just a warning, this cheese doesn't melt at all, so its likely to fall off when you eat the pizza. You could try putting it under the veggies, or just use mozzarella like normal pizzas. This was an experiment, and I thought it tasted good.

Pizza!

This was sort of a use-up-ingredients pizza, but pretty tasty anyway. Pesto/hummus (its not pesto, but not hummus...), onions, mushrooms, spinach, sardines, and cheddar. That's sort of a strange combination now that I think about it, but it tasted good. The best part is the hummus/pesto stuff.



The hummus/pesto was basically a ton of basil, some chickpeas, some toasted walnuts (they turned it gray, not very appetizing-looking, despite being delicious), some toasted garlic, salt, and lots of lots of oil trying to bring it together into a smooth paste. Didn't quite work out like that, but it works as a spread and tastes delicious.

The onions got sweated, as did the mushrooms, and the spinach, before I put them on the pizza. The dough was fairly standard, ~2C of flour to a cup of water and ~1/4C oil, and lots of salt. And yeast. No real rise time, just while I was prepping vegetables. We'll call it free-form pizza, since there isn't much of a recipe to go along with it. Worth making all the same though!

Toasty eggs

So, no photo, you'll have to use your imagination one this one. But it was delicious enough I've got to get it down in writing before I forget how worth the extra 15min to cook breakfast and then do dishes this breakfast actually was. I had some leftover bread, specifically, one thick slice of Baba a Louis' cheesey herb bread, that was starting to get stale, but not moldy yet. And that is some tasty bread, stale or not, so I was determined to use it up before it went bad. I also have cheddar cheese in the fridge right now, and tomatoes, and basil, and one fresh egg from the farmer's market last weekend (not sure its still fresh in that case, but its probably fresher than the supermarket variety). The tomato and basil were from Anne's garden, I suppose as a thank you for taking zucchini... Anyway, talk about good ingredients, I had an armful of them.

So, a pat of butter into one frying pan, and down goes the toast to fry up one side. Meanwhile I cut the tomato into slices and sucked out the seeds and juice (it browns better with less liquid), can't let any of that deliciousness go to waste. I also chiffonaded some basil (just because I like that word), and sliced some cheese. Once the bread was toasty on one side, I flipped it, and put the cheese down on top of it. Also added the tomato slices to the pan, with some salt. I got another pan going with some butter to fry the egg. You could do this all in one pan, but I was hungry, and impatient. At some point, just as the cheese was softening up, the tomatoes were ready to flip.

And just as the egg finished, the toast was done and the cheese was almost melty and the tomatoes were done, so I put the hot tomatoes on top of the cheese to help it finish melting, added the basil, dropped the egg on top, and voila. Breakfast. Best eaten with a knife and fork, but boy was that delicious - crunchy on the bottom, cheesy, eggy, with tomato and basil and a hint of buttery richness... drool. This is worthy of a dinner!

Chanterelle scromelette

I may not have a camera, but, I have a computer with photobooth... which means, the photos are utter crap. Anyway, while we were up in Vermont, Ed and I wandered over to the chanterelle patch and picked up a couple last little yellow fungi. It is near the end of their season, if there even is such a thing, but we got a fair number, and so yesterday I used some of them to make a delicious scrambled omelette. These things start out well, and then I get impatient and the omelette just turns into scrambled eggs. This happens every time. Maybe someday I'll learn the patience...


Start with about a tablespoon of butter, and throw in the mushrooms, roughly chopped, then salt them with some kosher salt. They'll give up a ton of water, I actually had to boil off some mushroom juice before I could get down to cooking them until the edges are crispy. It'll take about 20 minutes, and probably 2-3 more tablespoons of butter, before the mushrooms are properly crispy on the edges and a little chewy in the middle, and fully delicious. At that point, add your two eggs, scromble them around (totally a word when you're talking about scromelettes), until they're cooked to how you like them, and dump the whole mess on a plate. I grated some parmesan cheese on top, with some salt and pepper, and it was sheer deliciousness.

You could do this with any sort of mushroom. But the wild ones taste best...

No more camera

I lost my camera. And recipes are hopeless without a camera, how are you supposed to know what things look like? Hopefully, I come up with a solution soon... until then, go make some kale chips.