Hot Potato

My grandmother used to make potato soup.

Well, that’s what she called it anyhow.  I thought it was closer to liquid mashed potatoes.  Which, considering how she made mashed potatoes (and how any leftovers inevitably became potato soup), was probably not all that inaccurate.

I’ve talked before about my two grandmothers and their widely varying styles of cooking.  At that time, I said that mashed potatoes was one of the things they came to make the same way, and that I could no longer remember which one changed to match the other.  Well, I must have been having a heavy duty brain fart that day, because it seems pretty clear to me now.  My working class, North-Carolina-raised farmgirl grandmother, with her muscular arms, used a potato masher, because that’s how it’s done.  My social climbing, mountains-of-Virginia-far-in-the-rearview, slightly supercilious grandmother thought that was far too much effort.  She used a stand mixer.  Making mashed potatoes was just like making cake batter, as far as she was concerned.  My other grandmother (on the paternal side) didn’t think of this as cheating, per se, I don’t believe ... but certainly she thought it was unnecessarily fancy.  The regular old masher and regular old puttin’-yer-back-into-it had been good enough for her mother—and, no doubt, her own grandmother, and great-grandmother, and so on all the way back to whichever of her ancestors arrived with John Smith in Jamestown¹—so it was obviously good enough for her.  Just a masher, a few pats of butter, and some salt: that was literally all you needed.  If she ever even added milk (before she started trying to please me, that is), I don’t recall it.  Whereas my other grandmother (on the maternal side) added enough milk—or even, sometimes, cream—that it became almost the consistency of pudding.  After a while of turning up my nose and/or begging, my paternal grandmother gave in and started using the mixer and the milk too.

And this is what I prefer for my mashed potatoes: they should be smooth, and creamy, and buttery, and salty.  I don’t need sour cream, per se (though it’s okay if you want to add that in), or any other fancy-schmancy spices, and I certainly don’t need gravy.  Like ketchup for fries, you only need gravy for mashed potatoes if they’re particularly crappy mashed potatoes (like you’d get from most fast food places²).  The mashed potatoes my paternal grandmother used to make (before I cajoled her into using the mixer) were lumpy, and more mushy than creamy, and definitely not smooth.  And some people like that sort of thing.  But it was not for me.

But, if you take creamy mashed potatoes and just add more milk to it, I’m not sure you get to call that “potato soup.” I suppose I might be misremembering and there was more to it than that, but I do recall not thinking that much of it.  It was only years and years later that I had some potato leek soup from a decent restaurant that I realized that potato soup might be a pretty cool thing after all.  Another popular restaurant version of potato soup is sort of the soup version of a baked potato: it’s usually served with bacon, and cheese, and often chives.  Now, potato leek soup is a pretty lovely dish, and (baked) potato soup is just fine, but at some point a few years back I decided I wanted to try combine the best of both versions.  I’m not sure what got into me, but I ended up making something that has become a family favorite: my youngest, in particular, asks for it quite regularly, and soon she’ll be able to make it even better than I can.

I started by scouring the Internet for recipes.  I was looking to see how other people were making it so I could figure out what elements I wanted to keep and which I wanted to toss out.  Now, in my view, the primary thing to get right in potato soup is the consistency: my grandmother’s was too thin for my taste, but obviously you don’t want it as thick as actual mashed potatoes.  And the way that the vast majority of recipes online achieve the proper consistency is the same way you get thickness in gravy: flour.  Now, at the time, I was either doing a Whole 30 or just fresh off one, and I certainly was looking to avoid grains.³  Surely there were better options than regular old flour!  And, I resarched that, I discovered a curious thing: one of the big alternatives to flour is ... potato starch.

And, I thought, well, you know what has lots of potato starch? Potatoes!

So essentially my recipe contains about twice as many actual potatoes as most recipes you can find on the web.  But I think it’s all the better for it.  Certainly the consistency can’t be beat.  Instead of leeks or chives, I use yellow onions and celery, and I retain the thyme common in the potato-leek varieties, and the cheese common in the baked-potato-adjacent varieties.  It makes for a thick, creamy potato soup with a lot of flavor, but still tastes enough like good old mashed potatoes to qualify as comfort food.  My family⁴ really seems to love it too.  So here it is, for your perusal, and (possibly) enjoyment.  Bon appétit.

Potato Soup

Ingredients

• 1 large yellow onion
• 6 – 8 stalks of celery
• 8 large potatoes(*), either Russets or Yukon golds, or a mix of the two
• 1 – 2 tbsp of ghee
• 4 – 5 large pinches salt
• 15 grinds black pepper
• 2 cups milk
• 1 carton chicken broth (about 32 oz)
• a “large amount” of thyme
• a “small amount” of garlic powder
• 1 – 2 handfuls of “pizza cheese”

(*) When you buy a bag of potatoes, of course, you don’t get any say in the size, and I’ve never seen a Yukon gold that I would classify as “large” in any event.  My rough ratio is that 3 medium potatoes count as 2 larges, and 2 small potatoes count as 1 large.  Just err on the side of too many rather than not enough and you should be fine.

Hardware

• a good chopping knife
• a good potato peeler
• a large pot (what my grandmothers would call a “stewpot”), preferably with a lid
• a stick blender (a.k.a. “immersion blender”)
• a spoon for stirring (I like wood, but you do you)
• a ladle for serving

Directions

This one is actually pretty simple.  Rough chop the onion and the celery; peel and rough chop the potatoes.  The cutting board we use has a tray (a little like a Tefal, only a bit larger), and basically a large, rough-chopped onion fills that tray; the celery should work out to roughly the same amount, and the potatoes should be about four times that amount.

Honestly, peeling the potatoes is the only pain in the ass part of the whole procedure.  I often make the other family members help with this part.  We also sometimes use an electric potato peeler, but it’s a bit fiddly, and it also seems to waste a bunch of the actual potato, so I’m not saying I’d actually recommend that.

Anyhow, parallel to that, melt the ghee in the pot.  You can peel and chop everything first, and then do the ghee, but what I like to do is start with this step: turn the heat on just long enough to melt the ghee, then turn it off again while I chop everything.  That way I can just dump everything straight into the pot.  The ghee should be enough to cover the bottom of the pot with a slightly thick layer.

The veggies, salt, and pepper all go into the pot, and you’re going to cook it, covered, at medium to medium-high heat, for about 5 minutes.  Stir it every now and again to keep it from burning on the bottom, or, if you have a tightly fitting lid, just do what I do: hold the lid on and just shake it up and down a bit every minute-and-a-half or so.  We’re basically just trying to give the veggies a head start and sort of pre-soften them up a bit.

Once your 5-minute timer goes off, pour in your milk and chicken broth.  Now add the thyme and the garlic powder.  I never bother measuring it; I just use a system very similar to what I do for spaghetti and meatballs: cover the surface with with a thin layer of thyme (that’s a “large amount”), then add anywhere from ¼ to ½ as much of that amount of garlic powder, depending on how much you love garlic (that’s the “small amount”).  Stir it up, cover the pot, crank up the heat, and bring it to a boil.  Now lower the heat and simmer it for about 15 minutes, stirring perhaps every 5 minutes or so.

When that time goes off, turn off the heat entirely (trust me, it’ll be plenty hot) and hit it with the stick blender.  I like to move the blender up and down a bit to get everything really really smooth, but I also like to be a little haphazard so that every once in a while you get a surprise chunk in your bowl.  Once you’ve got the consistency like you want it, gradually stir in the shredded cheese.  In our house we favor a 3-cheese blend that we refer to as “pizza cheese” (because it’s great on pizza, natch): it’s always cheddar, mozzarella, and one other white cheese (if you’re using the Trader Joe’s version, that’s Monterey Jack; other versions may substitute provolone).  But you can use a Mexican cheese blend, or straight cheddar, or whatever floats your boat.  Just stir it in bit by bit until it essentially disappears: you’ll never see it in the soup, but it adds another layer of creaminess that’s tough to beat.  I like about two handsful in mine, but adjust to taste.  Or sprinkle a bit more on your bowl when serving.  Or both.

And that’s it!  Ladle it up and enjoy.  But be careful: it’s hot.  (Our youngest always puts a big bowlful in the freezer for a couple of minutes so she doesn’t burn her tongue.)  But, honestly, it’s so good I usually don’t mind burning my tongue a bit.  On a cold winter day, it’s the perfect warm-you-up meal, and it’s full of those comfort food vibes that warm your soul as well.  Tough to beat.

__________

1 Note: I don’t know for sure that my grandmother’s ancestors came over with the Virginia colonists, but I can say that all the ancestors I was able to trace were never more than 100 miles away from that landing spot.

2 The only “fast food” place I would eat ungravied mashed potatoes from is Boston Market.

3 This is less of a gluten thing than a general carb thing, at least for me.

4 Except for our picky middle child, who won’t eat much of anything that we cook.

Family Dinner

When I was kid, we would often to go to my grandparents’ house for dinner on Sunday.  Since I was lucky enough to have two sets of grandparents, this could mean wildly different cuisines.  On my father’s side, his parents, raised on farms in North Carolina, favored sprawling meals with many side dishes, and often multiple kinds of meat (usually some form of pork).  My mother’s side, on the other hand, fancied themselves as having come up in the world since their humble roots, and favored fancier, more coherent meals.  We might have turkey tetrazzini, or filet mignon with shoestring fries, or pot roast with potatoes and carrots (leading to the creation of what my grandmother called “hash” the following day).  But, if we were very lucky, we would have spaghetti and meatballs.

Now, back in my day most folks thought of spaghetti and meatballs as an Italian dish, though nowadays we know that it’s exactly as Italian as chicken tikka masala is Indian, thanks to articles from places like the Smithsonian (although I personally learned about it from Alton Brown).  But, as a child, it never occurred to me to think of it as anything other than grandmother food.  Spaghetti dinner was practically an all day affair: it cooked on the stove in a giant pot all day, sending out irresistible aromas and making everyone’s mouths water, and my mother and grandmother and Bernice, my grandmother’s housekeeper, would fuss over the proper amounts of spices to add.  When it got a bit closer to dinner, we would break out the saltines and bleu cheese as a sort of appetizer (I have never discovered where exactly this strange tradition originated).  Then it was time to eat, and there was a great family divide between those of us who just wanted to chop the long spaghetti into more manageable chunks so you could eat everything together, and those who insisted on twirling it around their forks to make giant pasta balls which you then ate followed by a big spoonful of sauce.  Some of us liked grated parmesan; some couldn’t stand the smell.  And of course we fought over the meatballs.

My mother made it at home, sometimes, but it was always considered a special-occasion food.  Both my brother and I took great pains to learn how to cook it, though we (eventually) began to deviate from the recipe in small ways.  Now The Mother makes it for us, far more regularly than I ever used to have it as a child (or even as a young adult).  It’s regularly requested by my children on birthday weekends, or holidays, or pretty much any time The Mother lets them set the menu.  There is, as far as I know, no Italian in my ancestry (although there’s an eighth of my heritage that I’ve never been able to track down), but this Italian-American dish has become very symbolic of our family’s culture, to the point where we typically refer to it using my last name (which is of course a complete misnomer, as it originates with my maternal grandmother).  Let me tell you the two family myths that are attached to its origin.

My Mother’s Story

When your grandfather was in The War [my grandfather served as a lieutenant in the Navy’s Construction Battalion—or “Seabees”—in World War II], his unit had an Italian-American cook.  That worthy gentleman [yes, my mother really talks like that] wanted to make food for his unit that was better than the standard rations, so, whenever possible, he cooked large meals with the best ingredients he could come up with.  This sauce is based on his mother’s recipe, but of course using canned ingredients instead of fresh because that’s all they really had access to.  When my father—your grandfather—came home from The War, he asked this cook for the recipe and brought it home to my mother (your grandmother) and that’s what she makes today.

My Father’s Story

That’s all crap.  Your grandmother told me one night she just got the recipe out of the Ladies’ Home Journal.

Which story is “true”?  Likely neither ... or possibly both.  But the point is, this is a meal of great significance to our family, and I thought it was probably worth preserving for posterity.  Let’s break it down.

The Spaghetti

For many years, I completely believed that we were eating spaghetti in our spaghetti and meatballs—I mean, after all, it’s right there in the name.  But, as it turns out, my grandmother always used vermicelli.  The pasta you pick is in one sense of utmost importance—after all, half the reason why spaghetti and meatballs is not authentically Italian is that Italians would not choose a thin pasta with no holes like spaghetti to go with their meat sauces—and, in another, completely irrelevant.  The beauty of this meal is that it pretty much tastes great with any pasta you like: I’ve had it with penne, farfalle, conchiglie (that’s the seashell shaped one), and even, when truly desperate, macaroni.  But most often we have it with some variation of spaghetti.  My (non-Italian, recall) family taught me that there were four different sizes of “spaghetti”:

• Spaghetti proper, which is the thickest.
• Spaghettini, also called thin spaghetti (just a bit thinner).
• Vermicelli (thinner still).
• Capellini, also known as “angel hair” pasta, the thinnest of all.

Now, personally, I find actual spaghetti way too thick.  My understanding from all those articles and whatnot is that we currently have a concept of spaghetti and meatballs primarily because, back in the turn of the century (not this one, the one before that), spaghetti was often the only pasta you could buy, if you didn’t want to make it yourself.  Spaghettini is all right; capellini is better; and of course vermicelli is the best, but I suppose that’s probably just because it’s what I was actually raised on.  Even in today’s choice-rich world, though, vermicelli seems hard to come by, for some reason, so I’ll admit to using capellini way more often than I’d prefer.  But, as I say, any pasta will taste good with this sauce.

The Meatballs

Perhaps surprisingly, this offers a lot of options as well.  For my grandmother, it was always the same: you go to the butcher, you get two pounds of beef and one pound of pork, and you have him grind them together.  Well, these days, you’d be hard pressed to find a butcher who will deal with pork at all (most of our remaining butchers are either kosher or halal), and even the grocery stores won’t do anything as radical as grind beef and pork together.  But, as it turns out, if you just buy ground meat and stick it in a big bowl and just sort of knead it all together, that works just fine.

Of course, you needn’t go to all the trouble of mixing two kinds of meat if you don’t want to.  Personally, I find meatballs made of all beef way too strong a flavor (but then again I have a compllicated relationship with beef).  I think my favorite these days is two-thirds turkey and one-third pork.  But you can also do 100% pork, or 100% turkey, or even—and I haven’t personally tried this, but I bet you it would work just fine—a plant based substitute such as Impossible.

As far as what to do with the meat, just form it into balls.  That’s it: no eggs, no bread crumbs, none of that fancy shit.  Maybe a little salt and pepper; occasionally some onion powder or garlic powder.  Make the balls a bit large (The Mother often uses an ice cream scoop for this purpose): they’re going to fall apart at least a little in the sauce, which will make it meat sauce, which is what you want.  But, in order to keep them from falling apart too much, you want to brown them a bit.

First, use some paper towels to pat the meatballs dry a bit (this is especially important when using ground turkey).  Dryer meatballs will brown better.  Next, in the biggest pot you’ve got, heat up some olive oil.  Then put some garlic in it: my grandmother would literally slice fresh cloves of garlic into thin slices and then brown them in the oil, fishing them out when they’d given up the ghost.  Nowadays we’re just as likely to use pre-minced garlic.  Use 4 – 6 cloves, or 1 – 2 heaping tablespoons (depending on how much you love garlic).  Also toss in a softball-sized yellow onion, diced fairly fine.  Once the garlic is starting to brown and the onions are starting to get translucent, start browning the meatballs.  You want them just browned enough to (mostly) hold together; you’re not trying to cook them all the way through.  You’ll need to turn them a few times to get them brown all over.

The Sauce

Obviously the most crucial component is the sauce.  The base of this is pretty simple:

• 4 8-oz cans of tomato sauce
• 4 6-oz cans of tomato paste
• 8 oz of water

We’ve also experimented with another 8 oz of tomato sauce and just skip the water, which makes the sauce a bit more intense—more tomato-y, if you see what I mean.  Stir all that together, trying to be careful not to break up the meatballs too much, though it’s fine if you lose a couple.  Cook it at a low simmer for a few hours: at least two, but probably no more than four.  About a half an hour before you’re ready to eat, it’s time to season.

In my grandmother’s recipe, there were actual amounts for everything.  However, nowadays we don’t measure any of the spices and seasonings at all.  Usually the the youngest and I handle the seasoning, and we have a simple system:

• Cover the surface of the sauce with a thin layer of basil.
• Sprinkle in a much smaller amount of oregano (perhaps a quarter as much).
• Stir it all in.
• Now, taste the sauce:
• If it’s not salty enough, add some salt (duh).
• If it’s not sweet enough, add more basil.
• If it’s not savory enough, add some garlic powder.
• If it’s not herby enough, add more oregano.
• If it doesn’t have enough kick, add some pepper.

That’s pretty much it.  If you want the original measurements, I typically remember them via the mnemonic that you need to use every one of your measuring spoons:

• 1 tbsp of sugar
• 1 tsp of basil
• ½ tsp of salt
• ¼ tsp of pepper

The sugar was the first to fall by the wayside: basil provides a more natural-tasing sweetness, and you require far less of it, and it’s healthier (not that I mean to imply that this is a low-calorie dish or anything).  Next, the salt and pepper got moved to being applied directly to the meat, which gives your meatballs a bit more direct seasoning.  Most recently, I added the oregano: I just think it provides a very distinctive flavor that gives food a very Italian identity.

About 15 minutes before you’re ready to eat, boil your pasta of choice.  And you’re done.

So that’s our family recipe for spaghetti and meatballs.  It’s lasted for four generations now, and it’s stood up to a good deal of tinkering over the years without ever losing its essential character.  It’s a fairly short ingredient list, and there’s nothing too fancy in the preparation.  But, despite all that, it’s probably the favorite meal for about three-quarters of my extended family.  It’s a meal that we love, and one that is quintessentially us.

Whither the beef?

When I was a kid, the only thing I liked to eat was hamburgers.

For my own children, it was more about the chicken nuggets (at least for the first two).  But, for me, it was hamburgers.  At home, my parents would cook hamburger helper a lot, but that’s still hamburger, right?  I didn’t eat chicken, period.  Wouldn’t touch pork (well, unless it was disguised as bacon, of course).  And seafood?  Don’t get me started.  My grandparents on my mom’s side loved seafood.  They would often go out to eat at very nice seafood restaurants, and sometimes they’d take me.  And there was literally nothing on the menu I would eat.  Oh, sure: nowadays, almost every restaurant will offer a hamburger or some chicken nuggets on a kid’s menu, regardless of the actual cuisine.  But not in my day.  In my day, if you didn’t like the type of food they had, you were just supposed to suck it up and eat it anyway.  But I was a stubborn child.  I would eat nothing rather than eat seafood.  I spent many a meal eating Captain’s Wafers sandwiches with butter in the middle that my grandmother would make me, and that was literally all I’d get.  Once when I was perhaps 8 years old my grandfather gave me a few dollars and told me that, if I wanted a hamburger so bad, there was a McDonald’s next door: I could go get it myself.  I was a painfully shy kid, and the thought of going somewhere (even directly next door to a restaurant where my grandparents could easily see me from their table by the window) and actually interacting with adults was horrifying, and, in retrospect, I think my grandfather knew this and the whole thing was sort of a challenge.  But I ate a hamburger and fries that night.

I was committed to the beef, is what I’m saying.

Besides the fast food hamburgers and the hamburger helper, there was “hamburger steak,” a dish (and I’m being very generous in calling it a “dish”) that my father made by serving a hamburger patty in onions and gravy rather than on a bun, bologna sandwiches (always beef bologna, of course), spaghetti and meatballs (meatballs composed either solely or primarily of, you guessed it: beef), beef stew, the occasional beef pot roast at my grandmother’s house which then turned into something she called “beef hash” the next day, and probably a few more ways to dress up cow meat that I’m not even remembering right now.  The only thing I can really remember eating as a child that wasn’t beef was hot dogs (we didn’t really do beef hot dogs back in those days).  And the occasional meal of chicken chow mein (my foodie grandfather again) that was served in that particular way that they used to make it on the East Coast before they decided that it should be full of bean sprouts (bleaaugh).  It was a whoooole lotta beef.

Of course, most of it wasn’t very good beef.  I didn’t care for steak (too chewy), and my parents and grandparents were just as happy not to have to pay for one for me anyhow.  I didn’t do prime rib either, on those super rare occasions when the parents or grandparents would spring for it.  So the vast majority of the beef I ate didn’t taste much like beef: the hamburgers tasted of mustard and ketchup; my dad’s “hamburger steak” tasted of gravy; most of those meatballs tasted like my grandmother’s spaghetti sauce; hamburger helped tasted mostly like MSG.  And, you know, back in those days, that might have been for the best.  Beef was pricey (chicken was the “cheap” meat back then), so most of what I was eating was right down at the lower end of the quality spectrum.  Which is fine: I was a dumb kid.  Don’t waste the good stuff on me.

Of course, as I got older, I did get a little more discerning.  I never really developed a taste for seafood, but I started liking various forms of chicken, and even started appreciating pork chops, not to mention all the really delightful disguises that pork can assume, like pepperoni, salami, capicola (for Italian subs), andouille sausage (for red beans and rice), country sausage (for biscuits and gravy), country ham (for ham rolls on Christmas morning), etc etc etc.  I even started liking the finer forms of beef ... somewhat.  I’ve always been the sort of person who appreciates a good filet mignon but otherwise can take or leave a steak, and as far as I’m concerned the attraction of prime rib lies almost entirely in the au jus.  Even what is probably my all-time favorite beef dish, steak au poivre, is, again, all about the sauce.  Curiouser and curiouser.

Of course, in recent years, even the once-lowly hamburger is getting new appreciation from the culinary world.  First they told us to stop using so much damn ketchup (or mayo, or thousand islands dressing, or whatever your slathering of choice may be) so we could actually taste the meat.  Then, once we decided that was a terrible idea, they started telling us to seek out a better class of meat.  Organic, pasture raised, grass-fed: all that stuff became all the rage.  Even kobe, if you want to get really pricey.  And, as the much better qualities of beef have gradually become more and more commonplace, and we’ve all become more and more able to actually taste the meat, and I’ve become more and more discerning, I’ve discovered a very curious thing about myself.

I don’t actually like the taste of beef.

When I look back on my life at the quantity of beef I’ve packed away, this is practically shocking.  I mean, how can I not like beef?  Everyone likes beef.  It was the most consumed meat in my country of origin for the first twenty-five years of my life, and #2 for the last thirty.  In 2020, the U.S. consumed 20 billion pounds of beef, which is roughly 90 pounds of beef for every man, woman, and child in the country.  And for 50 or so years, I was perfectly happy with beef.  Until I could actually taste it.  Now ... not so much.  Now, I would have to rate it as “meh” at best.  Quite often, in a beef dish made with particularly high-quality grass-fed beef, I actually dislike it altogether.  Sometimes, when someone in my house is cooking beef (especially in combination with garlic), it can actually make me a bit queasy, even though I know I’m going to enjoy the taste once it’s done.

And of course the silly thing is, it’s not particularly good for me.  I know there’s some debate about whether beef is healthy or not, but I think a lot depends on the individual.  For me, I can tell you definitively that there are only a few things I know for a fact help me lose weight, and one of them is to cut out red meat.  So what occurs to me is, why should I bother continuing to eat a meat that makes me fat and I don’t even like the taste all that much?

Oh, I don’t propose to cut out beef altogether.  I still like a nice filet every now and again, but for me “every now and again” means about once a year.  When it comes to meatballs or hamburger-helper-style meals or tacos—at least when we’re cooking it ourselves—I find that ground turkey is perfectly lovely.  And for the ever-popular hamburger itself ... well, I’ve started eating Impossible burgers.

I tried it on a whim, really.  Just to see if it could really live up to the hype.  So, can I tell it isn’t beef?  Of course.  Then again, that’s sort of a plus from my perspective.  The more important question is, can I tell it isn’t meat?  And the answer is, no, not really.  It sort of tastes like an exotic meat you might get at a fancy chain, like an ostrich burger from Fuddrucker’s (and, yes: I’ve had one of those before).  Like a turkey burger, but different enough that you probably wouldn’t think it actually was turkey.  Point being, it’s a perfectly acceptable meat substitute.  And they say that plant substitutes such as Impossible are better for the planet, so that’s a win-win in my book.  It does contain soy, so I try not to eat it as a regular thing (soy has its own set of pros and cons), but, as a sometime food, it’s probably better (and better for me) than actual beef.

So that’s where I’ve landed on the topic of America’s #2 favorite (formerly #1) processed animal protein.  I think I just don’t need it any more.  And I think that’s going to be good for me in the long run.  No need to go full-on vegetarian, I don’t think, but getting a bit closer has got to be a good thing.

Saladosity, Part 18: Egg Salad

[This is the eighteenth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

(If you need a refresher about my salad-making lingo, go back and review our first salad.)

Well, after six years, I’ve finally gotten to the last salad from my original plan for this series.  Who knew it would take so long?  Well, I suppose pretty much anyone could have predicted it, given my track record.  But, still, it’s nice to finally arrive at the end ... of what I’d originally conceived.  Of course, in six years, one can come up with even more things to blather on about on a given topic, and salad-making—one of the best things to come out of my search to transform my diet into a more healthy one—is a font of boundless ideas.  So perhaps this won’t be the end after all.  But we’ve arrived at an end, so let’s see what awaits us here.

Egg salad.

Now, I hear what you’re saying: egg salad doesn’t count as proper salad!  It’s a sandwich spread, for fuck’s sake!  But there’s where I think you’re wrong.  I always liked egg salad as a kid, and I’ve occasionally tried to buy an egg salad sandwich at various restaurants.  They used to make a pretty decent one in the sandwich joint in our office complex at my last job.  Unfortuantely, they charged $6 for it.  So I didn’t get it very often, and, every time I did, I would shake my head at my own foolishness: I could have made a week’s worth of egg salad sandwiches for myself and still have had a few bucks left over.  And it would have been just as good ... maybe even better.  ‘Cause egg salad is easy to make, and delicious to boot.

But what does it have to with salad, you ask?  Because, despite having the word “salad” right there in the name, egg salad isn’t salad.  I don’t think there’s much debate about that.  But, once I gave up bread (temporarily¹), I started looking for other ways to enjoy things I used to use bread for.  Lettuce-wrapped burgers are just dandy, I found, while hot dogs are great if you use the mustard and relish as a dip.  I invented² “cheesewiches,” which is turkey or ham or whatnot in between two slices of cheese—bread isn’t really needed to enjoy luncheon meat; it’s just there to have something to hold on to to keep you from getting mayo on your fingers.  And, when it comes to egg salad, you can just eat it straight up, no bread required.

Or ...

Or you can actually use it as a salad dressing.  It may sound like a wacky concept at first, but give it a try: I think you’ll find that you like it as much as I do.  All it really does is give your egg salad a little crunch, and, honestly, a lot of egg salad needs crunch.  And, if you think about it, none of the individual ingredients of egg salad are that weird in the context of a salad: we used eggs in our chef’s salad, we used mayo and mustard in our autumnal salad, and salt and pepper is perfectly reasonable on salads.  And that only leaves us with ...

Pickle Relish

Okay, at first you may be thinking: who puts pickle relish in salad?  But, actually, we already did that.  We made Thousand Island dressing for our chef’s salad, and you can’t make Thousand Island dressing without pickle relish.  So, I’ve talked about pickle relish before: both for chef’s salad, and also when discussing buying pickles while shopping for dry goods.  But here’s a refresher:

• Sweet relish is too sweet.  If that’s your thing, feel free to use it, of course.  But we’re not dressing a hot dog here: we’re dressing a salad.  And you don’t need the added sugar.
• Dill pickles have zero calories, zero fat, and zero carbs.  Whether you subscribe to Whole30, Atkins, or Weight Watchers, dill pickles are an entirely free food.
• Dill pickle relish is hard to find, but almost trivial to make.

I actually explained how to make your own pickle relish for the Thousand Island dressing, but I glossed over it quickly because there was a lot more going on there.  I’ll slow it down this time:

• Take your jar of dill pickles that you bought at the store.  Pour out maybe half the juice.  (A little less than half is probably better than a little more in this case.)
• Just dump all the rest of it into your food processor or blender.
• Pulse it until it looks like relish.
• That’s mostly all there is to it, but you may need to stop and stir it all up a few times just to keep the bigger pickle chunks from hiding out in the corners and never getting diced.  And, honestly, you’ll probably still end up with a couple of bigger hunks.  But that’s fine.

And, voilà: pickle relish.  Couldn’t be simpler, really.

Egg Salad “Dressing”

Now we’ll make egg salad.  You don’t have to use this only for salads, of course.  You could put it on bread, if you’re still doing bread occasionally.  Or just eat it straight out of the container: it’s very good.  But give it a try on some veggies.  You’ll be surprised at how well that works.

Here’s all you need:

• 2 hard-boiled eggs (we boiled a bunch for chef’s salad, remember?)
• 2 big spoons of our homemade mayonnaise
• 2 full squirts mustard (I like yellow for this, but you do you)
• 4 little spoons of the pickle relish we made up above
• 2 heavy pinches of salt
• about 10 grinds of black pepper

I like to prepare the eggs the same way I would for making deviled eggs.  Just cut each one in half and pop the yolks out into your bowl.  Take the whites and cut them into big chunks: perhaps four slices the long way and four the short way.  Set the chunks aside.

You might want to use a fork to mash up the yolks a bit, but basically it’s just mixing at that point.  Put the whites in last after everything else is mixed together so they retain their shape a bit.  Tweak the pepper to your taste, but I like a lot of pepper in my eggs.  Remember, a “big spoon” is a tablespon and a “little spoon” is a teaspoon, but I’m talking about the ones you eat out of, not necessarily the exact measurements ... I very rarely measure things when making salad stuff.  Again, we’re talking quick and easy here.  Use the big spoon from the mayo to do the mixing: that saves a dish to clean up afterwards.³  You’ll probably want to use a slotted spoon for the relish to avoid getting too much juice into your egg salad; otherwise you get runny egg salad, which isn’t good for anyone.

Egg salad

As always, you’re ready, and it’s just assembly.  At its simplest, you could just take your base veggies and toss some egg salad on ’em.  (In my dressing parlance, I would advise “heavy”: this is less salad veggies with egg salad dressing and more egg salad with some salad veggies in it.)  But I’ll offer you some helpful tips:

• As always, use whatever type of veggies you like.  However, personally this is one of the very few types of salad where I usually forgo the cucumbers.  You can leave ’em in, of course—they’ll taste perfectly okay—but they’re not adding any crunch, and I don’t find the flavors mesh that well.
• On the other hand, the scallions (or onions, in a pinch) and peppers are great.  You might think it sounds weird at first, but go with it.  The lettuce, of course, is no different than having lettuce on your egg salad sandwich: it’s perfectly lovely.
• The celery is the truly amazing part though.  In fact, what I usually do is add the finely chopped celery directly into the egg salad.  Even when I’m eating the egg salad in other contexts, that celery really kicks it up a notch.
• For a truly fancy egg salad, see if you can find some watercress.  I personally can’t ever find any, but I had bought some egg salad once from a grocery store, at the butcher counter where you can buy meats or potato salad and stuff like that by the pound, and they were selling egg salad that they made fresh right there, and it had watercress in it, and it was awesome.  One day I’m going to find some watercress at some grocery store I go to and I’m going to buy a whole bunch of it and take it home and make massive batches of egg salad with it.  If you’re gonna dream, dream big, I always say.

And that’s all there is to it.  Salad with egg salad (egg salad salad?) is surprisingly good, surprisingly healthy (if you made the mayo and the pickle relish as I suggsted, there’s zero sugar and very few carbs⁴), and, if you enjoyed egg salad as a kid like I did, kind of nostalgic.  But also with a crunchier, more sophisticated taste that lets you know you’re not just easting kid stuff.  It’s a win-win.

Next time, we’ll look back over what’s changed with my salad-making procedures over the past six years.  And maybe even toss in a bonus salad or two.

__________

1 This was part of doing my take on Whole30, you may recall.

2 Probably not.

3 And you can even use it to eat your salad with afterwards.  I eat most of my salads with a spoon because I hate chasing bits of veggie around a bowl, but this one in particular is more of a spoon-type affair.

4 Technically, egg yolks have some carbs.  Just not very many.

Saladosity, Part 17: Chef's

[This is the seventeenth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

(If you need a refresher about my salad-making lingo, go back and review our first salad.)

A good chef’s salad is a thing of beauty.  It is both meat and veggies in a wonderfully balanced presentation, and also it’s delicious.  Now, most people will agree that a chef’s salad must have meat and cheese in addition to the eggs, but there’s a multitude of different opinions on which meat and cheese to use.  This is the recipe that I learned at my first non-fast-food-restaurant job, a college dive bar called the Mason Jar Pub (near my alma mater of George Mason University).  It wasn’t a very good restaurant overall, but the chef’s salad was pretty decent, and that’s where I learned to make it.  I still love eating it today.

The Protein

In my opinion, the absolute best meats to use are turkey and roast beef.  One of the tricks is to find lunch meat that is sliced perfectly: too thick and it’ll be hard to assemble, too thin and it’ll just rip into shreds.  Also, turkey that is sliced into a perfect, large circle is ideal; you can be a little more flexible on the shape of the roast beef.  Now, you can also cut it yourself, but for one thing it’s a pain in the ass, and for another it’s hard to get the slices just right.  Unless you have an industrial meat slicer.  But then you’re likely to cut your fingers off, so that’s not a great solution either.  Just buy good quality meats with no nitrites and you’ll be fine.

The Cheese

Now, you could use any cheese you like.  But I’m going to suggest two criteria to narrow it down:

• You need a cheese with good plasticity.  For this reason, I find that cheddar or Swiss are terrible choices.  When you try to put everything together, those types of cheese just crumble into a big mess

• I personally think that white cheeses just complement lunch meats better.  Sure, a decent Colby could work, but is it going to taste as good as some of your other options?

So the obvious choice is provolone, and it should definitely be your go-to if you have difficulty finding decent choices at your market, or you’re just not adventurous when it comes to cheese.  If you can find sliced mozzarella, that could also work, but I find it a bit bland for this particular application.  Monterey Jack is not bad, and if you wanted to be super fancy, Edam or Jarlsberg would be the way to go (I think Gouda is both not quite plastic enough and just a bit too strong).  But my absolute favorite is havarti.  It’s got a great flavor that is mild but not bland, you can often find it pre-sliced,¹ and it has the perfect amount of flexibility.  If you’ve not yet tried it, definitely give it a go.

The Eggs

The other protein you’ll need is hard-boiled eggs, of course.  There’s not much art to boiling an egg, but still some folks have difficulty getting them to that perfect consistency without the annoying green rings forming on them.²  So here’s how I do it.

Possibly you have an electric kettle for boiling water for tea.  They’re awesome: you fill it with water, push the button, and voilà: it boils, then turns itself off.  They don’t last forever though: after a bit, you’ll find yours starts to look a bit ragged ... maybe it has a few waterspots here and there ... maybe the lid doesn’t fit perfectly any more.  So you just buy a new one, right?  They’re not that expensive, after all.  So what do you do with the old one?  Just throw it away, I guess?

No.  You use it to hard-boil eggs in.

Two eggs is typically enough for a chef’s salad, but I often do 5 or 6 at a time and just keep them in the fridge.³  You lower the eggs gently into the empty kettle, hopefully not cracking any,⁴ just barely cover them with cold water, plug it in and hit that button.  Now walk away.  The water will come to a boil, the kettle turns itself off, then the eggs just sit there as the water slowly cools.  Bam! perfect hard-boiled eggs every time.  Come back once the water is cool, or whenever you like.  Hours later, even—that’s the beauty of this method.  No timers, you can’t possibly overcook them, it just ... works.

Dump the water out and either use the eggs right away or stick ’em in the fridge for later.  For chef’s salad purposes, peel a couple of eggs and crack out that handy dandy egg slicer I told you to buy when we talked about salad equipment.  Open, close, and you have perfect slices; just throw the top and bottom slices out, because they’re all white and no yolk.  Unless, you know, you’re into that sort of thing.  I usually just feed them to the dog.  Or my daughter.

The Dressing

Now, you can put any old sort of dressing on a chef’s salad that you like, but I’m a firm believer that this is the perfect place to break out a lovely Thousand Island dressing.  The problem is, most store-bought TI’s are going to be full of stuff that you may not be too thrilled with, like soybean oil, and preservatives, and unnecessary sugar.  But, you know what?  Thousand Island dressing is one of the simplest things in the world: it’s nothing but mayo, ketchup, and pickle relish.⁵  You could make that yourself.

So let’s do that.

Thousand Island Dressing

Now, first thing I have to warn you is, it’s practically impossible to make a good Thousand Island dressing without any added sugar, because it’s almost impossible to make ketchup without any added sugar.  So this will not be Whole30 compliant, unless you’re dedicated enough to go out and buy Primal ketchup.  But you certainly don’t need any sugar beyond what’s in the ketchup itself, so just get a good quality ketchup and don’t stress too much.  It won’t have very much sugar.

The second thing I’m going to warn you about is, this isn’t a particularly sweet TI.  It’s going to be a bit on the tangy side.  Personally, I consider that a feature, but your mileage may vary.

After a lot of fiddling, I’ve managed to come up with the following, easy-to-remember formula:

• 1 squirt of dijon mustard
• 2 heavy pinches of salt
• 3 big spoonfuls of mayo
• 4 generous squirts of ketchup
• 5 small spoonfuls of pickle relish, or 5 whole pickle slices
• 6 grinds of black pepper

For the mayo, just use the homemade mayo I taught you how to make when we did the autumnal salad.  For the pickles or relish, my preference is to use dill pickles, from which I make my own relish.  You can use sweet relish, or sweet (sometimes called “bread and butter”) pickles, but that’s more sugar, and it’s not necessary.⁶  You could also buy dill pickle relish, but I’ve never found that anywhere other than Whole Foods, and who can afford that?  So just make your own.

If you’re using whole pickles—and let me stress that I’m not talking about a whole pickle spear, but just a slice such as you might find on a hamburger—then you need a food processor, or perhaps a stick blender.  Personally, I just take a whole jar of pickles and dump it into the blender (don’t forget to add half the juice as well!) and make dill pickle relish in bulk.⁷  If you’re using relish, you can literally just put everything in a bowl and stir it with the spoon you used for the mayo.  (If you’re not sure what I mean by “big spoonful” of mayo, I’m talking about a tablespoon—the kind you eat out of, not necessarily the measuring kind.  But they’re probably pretty close to each other.)

You can also add some white vinegar, if you want it even more tangy, but I find that the relish will bring along enough vinegar on its own.  You can also add a small amount of garlic powder, if you want it to have a bit more sharpness.  Or substitute yellow mustard for the dijon if you find it a bit too sharp.  But basically it’s just the ketchup, the mayo, and the pickle relish, and everything thing else is just for flavor.⁸

If you have more than you need for your salad(s), put the rest in a jar and stick it in the fridge.  Use it on your burgers, if you like.

Chef’s salad

Once again, you’re ready, and it’s just assembly.

On your cutting board, put down a slice of turkey.  Put a slice of roast beef on top, or maybe two slices if they’re small, but don’t overlap them too much.  Now lay a slice of cheese over that.  Don’t center the roast beef and the cheese on the turkey; rather, make it closer to the edge that’s closest to you.  Now roll up the turkey, away from you.  The turkey is almost certainly the roundest, and probably the least likely to fall apart, so it’s the best choice for the outside layer.  The rolling up will naturally push the inner layers toward the other edge, but, because you placed them off-center, they won’t move enough to push out past the turkey.  The stiffness of the cheese will help keep it together too, unless you ignored me and used cheddar or Swiss, in which case it’ll just break into bits and make a big mess.  If you do the whole thing right, you get a meat-and-cheese roll-up which will naturally hold itself together.  Cut off the messy bits at either end of the roll-up, because they’re not uniform; either just eat them, or feed them to your dog (or, again: to your daughter).  Take what’s left and cut it into quarters and turn each on its side: you end up with beautifully marbled discs of awesomeness.

Now do that a few more times if you’re making chef’s salad for the whole family (and why wouldn’t you be?).  My general rule of thumb is one roll-up per person and one extra.  Two for an individual salad might be too much, but then again you can just eat the extra discs later.⁹

Put your base veggies in a shallow bowl.  Wikipedia will tell you that you need cucumbers and tomatoes at a minimum, but honestly I don’t care for tomatoes in my chef’s salad.  (Cucumbers, on the other hand, are always a good call.)  But, really, whatever veggies you’ve already got chopped up is fine.  Now put your little meat discs on top of the veggies; I like to put one at each compass point and one in the center, but arrange however seems best to you.  Put one slice of egg on each disc.  Now put a normal amount of the homemade Thousand Island dressing ... maybe even a light amount.  Lean toward the lighter side.  Personally, while I like to eat my salad veggies with a spoon (I despise chasing small veggie bits around my plate with the fork), you really need to eat the egg-topped discs with a fork in a single bite each ... this may be the only salad where a spork is appropriate.  I usually just end up using a fork and a spoon, but you do you.  Delicious, nutritious, and very filling.

Next time, we’ll stretch our definition of what “salad” actually means.

__________

1 For instance, I buy that way from—where else?—Trader Joe’s.

2 Don’t forget: the green rings are unsightly, but they won’t hurt you.  Kind of like when your avocadoes turn brown: you can still eat them safely, they’re just not as pretty.

3 Useful for healthy snacks, and also for other salads.  Natch.

4 If you do crack one, you’ll just get wisps of egg white in your water.  Which isn’t the end of the world, but it does make a big mess in your electric kettle, which is why you only use old ones for this.

5 Interestingly enough, this is also the exact recipe for the “special sauce” that many burger joints use.  Yes, that’s right: your Big Mac basically just has Thousand Island dressing on it.

6 Or, in my opinion, good.

7 If you’ve got an extra pickle jar laying around, you could also do half the jar and save the other half for eating, if you’re into that sort of thing.  I’m not, but my daughter would be irked at me if I didn’t leave her any pickles for snacking on.

8 Okay, the mustard can also help with keeping it from separating in the fridge.  But mostly for flavor.

9 Honestly, sometimes I just make these meat-and-cheese cylinders without the salad and just eat them without even bothering to cut them into discs.

Saladosity, Part 16: Mexican

[This is the sixteenth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

(If you need a refresher about my salad-making lingo, go back and review our first salad.)

This is one of my all-time favorite salads.  It’s a little more of a pain to make, and I hadn’t made it in quite a while for that reason, but I returned to it recently and I fell in love all over again.  Admittedly I took a little shortcut this last time around, but I’ll point that out to you when we get there so that you can take it too, if you like.

The Protein

You have all sorts of options for protein here.  If you really want meat, your all-time best choice is whatever leftover taco meat you have from last night.  If you’re not prone to having any leftovers in that area, you might try taking a leftover chicken breast, dicing up part of it, applying a bit of taco seasoning (or chili powder, in a pinch), and heating it up for just a few seconds in the microwave.  If you’re really desperate and you simply must have meat, substitute canned chicken for the leftover chicken breast.

But you know what I’ve discovered?  It’s perfectly lovely without any meat at all.  Just use pistachios.  Now, you may say “but wait! pistachios aren’t Mexican!” No, in fact, pistachios are from the Middle East.  But they really do work here.  I don’t know that I can tell you why ... you’re just going to have to trust me on this one.  I will use leftover taco meat if it’s handy, and I’ve done the chicken thing a couple of times, but, honestly: pistachios are pretty damned good.  Sometimes better than meat.

Plus, you know, if you happen to subscribe to a vegetarian flavor of nutritional tribes, you don’t want the meat anyhow.  For paleo flavors, cashews are perfect.  I think the only reason to avoid the cashews would be if you’re allergic to them.  If so, first of all my condolences, but secondly, try the chicken.  It’s also a good call.

The Cheese

Obviously you want the shredded Mexican cheese blend that we talked about when we went shopping for meat and cheese.  If you’re being strict about the paleo and avoiding the dairy, you can omit the cheese and you won’t miss too much.  But I think it’s better with.

The Crunch

The go-to here would of course be crushed up tortilla chips.  But, whether Atkins or Whole30 or even Weight Watchers, corn chips are not considered an ideal choice for a healthy diet.  They’re grains, they’re carbs, and they add a decent chunk of calories.  So here’s where the plantain chips that we picked up when we went shopping for nuts come in.  Plantain chips are crappy for just eating straight out of the bag, but that should be considered a feature, not a bug.  What they’re great for is substituting:

• They make excellent “crackers”: have them with some cheese, or dip them in guacamole or hummus.
• They’re imperfect but surprisingly yummy nonetheless at playing the role of oats in granola.
• They’re not too shoddy at faking as potato chips, at least for culinary purposes.  Like on top of casseroles that called for crushed chips.
• They do a damned fine job as faux tortilla chips, if you crumble them up and put them on salads.

Just take a bag of plantain chips and beat it up a bit, then toss it into a zip-loc bag for maximum freshness.

The Dressing

What really gives this salad its kick is the guacamole dressing, and it is in fact the only salad where I’m going to recommend you use a “heavy” amount of dressing (which, remember, is defined as “more than you normally would”).  This dressing is so damn good, you’re just going to want a lot of it.

Now, the rough ingredients of the dressing are pretty basic: you need guacamole, sour cream, and some cilantro dressing.  The first two are pretty simple.

Remember that guacamole is one of the things we talked about when we went shopping for cold goods.  In our house, we’ve settled into a rhythm of buying those big boxes of Wholly Guacamole at Costco, tossing most of ’em into the freezer, and just rotating into the fridge as needed.  One container of that is the perfect amount for this dressing.  You could make guac fresh every time you wanted this salad ... but then you wouldn’t eat this salad that often, and that would be a shame.

Sour cream is sour cream.  One big spoonful should do it.  If you’re looking to avoid dairy, you could skip this part and it might be okay ... never tried it, personally.

The cilantro dressing is the only complicated part.  What I like to do when I’m feeling industrious is make my own.  Unlike having to make the guacamole part, this would something you do once a month or whatever, and then you just have it on hand every time.  I originally concocted my recipe (below) because my friendly neighborhood Trader Joe’s brand of cilantro dressing is heavy on the soybean oil, and I don’t like that.  Now, I’m going to be honest with you here: we’ve since discovered Primal, and they make a super yummy cilantro lime dressing—it’s not strictly Whole30 safe, but only because it contains (organic) honey, which ... c’mon: that’s a very small concession to make.  So use that if you don’t want to make your own.  But if you do want to try making it from scratch, just follow the directions below, and you won’t be disappointed.

Once you have the cilantro dressing, all you want to do is mix your guac and sour cream together in a bowl; it will be super-thick, so just drizzle in some cilantro dressing and stir, repeating until you get the consistency of a fairly thick dressing.  In my experience, if you get the consistency right, the taste will just automatically be perfect.

Cilantro Dressing

You’re going to need a food processor or blender for this one.  Pour in ⅓ of a cup of pepitas (those’re the roasted pumpkin seeds we bought when we went shopping for nuts), 2/3 of a cup of milk, ⅓ of a cup of oil (more on that in a sec), 2/4 of a cup of grated parmesan cheese, and ¼ of a cup of white wine vinegar.  (If you do it in the order I’ve suggested, and you do 2 ¼ cups for the parmesan instead of ½ cup, you’ll get by with only using 2 measuring cups and minimal mess.)

Which oil to use?  Well, use what you like, but I would try to avoid the “bad” oils like soybean, peanut, canola, or palm.  Avocado is amazing (that’s what Primal uses in theirs, for what it’s worth).  Grapeseed is also not bad.  I don’t think olive works well, taste-wise, but perhaps you feel differently.

Now add some chopped jalapeños.  I used to get them pre-chopped and canned from TJ’s, but then I started buying packages of fresh ones.  The fresh ones are more of pain, because you have to chop them yourself, and it is very easy to burn the crap out of yourself when learning to cut jalapeños, but eventually you get the hang of it, and one of those little packages of jalapeños is enough for 4 batches of this dressing (divie your choppped bits into 4 roughly equal piles, toss one in the blender, and freeze the other 3 for later).  But the canned is fine too.

Now you’re going to want to add about 5 cloves of garlic.  Feel free to substitute minced if you like; it’ll all end up that way in just a bit.

The last task of any complexity at all is to take a big bunch of cilantro (I typically use however much is in a Trader Joe’s pack of organic cilantro), separate out the stems, and toss the leaves in the blender.  We don’t need the stems for this recipe, but you can compost them, or perhaps you have an animal that might like them (our guinea pig always did).  Or, you know: just toss ’em.

Two heavy pinches of salt, 12 or so grinds of black pepper, and turn all that into a liquid.  Finally, remember that homemade mayo we made for our autumnal salad?  Make another batch, then immediately dump it into the blender.  This time, just pulse it a few times to mix it all together.  The resulting consistency should be a nice, viscous-but-not-thick liquid, which is perfect for some salads all on its own.  Also perfect for thinning out guacamole dressing while adding a whole bunch of flavor.

Mexican salad

Once again, you’re ready, and it’s just assembly.

• base veggies
• pistachios (or seasoned meat, if you prefer; slightly warm)
• crushed plantain chips
• shredded Mexican cheese
• guacamole dressing (heavy)

This one is a very hearty salad.  It’s got a nice crunch, but it’s really the smooth, creamy goodness of that guacamole dressing that makes it all come together.  For me, this is my entire meal, and I can’t get enough, so I typically make a huge one.  Try this once or twice and you will never look at a “taco salad” from a chain restaurant in the same way ever again.

Next time, we’ll get meaty.

Saladosity, Part 15: Autumnal

[This is the fifteenth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

(If you need a refresher about my salad-making lingo, go back and review our first salad.)

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why this salad is called an “autumn salad” ... I don’t personally find it particularly autumnal, but I searched online for salads with similar ingredients, and what little concensus there was in the naming of it pointed to the seasonal moniker, so here we are.  Perhaps its because the fruit and nuts we’re going to add are commonly harvested in the autumn ... although, these days, you should have no problems finding any of this stuff year ‘round.  Still, “autumn salad” is what I’ve always called it, once I started calling it anything at all, and that’s what we’re sticking with here.

The Fruit

So this is one of those salads with some fruit in it.¹  Hopefully that doesn’t turn you off.  Trust me that this will all work out.

What this salad really should have in it is pears.  However, I dislike using pears for two reasons:

• I have a hell of a time keeping pears from going bad.  I like this salad quite a bit, but it’s very much a “once in a while” salad.  It’s a bit more of a pain to make, and it does contain some added sugar, so I just don’t eat it as often as the others.  That means that I often don’t get around to the pears before they go bad.
• Pears are, at least for me, a huge pain to prepare.  They’re annoying to peel, due to the irregular shape, and it’s annoying to try to get the core out.

Now, if you have some secret way to get pears into chunks, and you eat pears often enough that they won’t get bad, I definitely encourage you to substitute pears.  They’ll actually make this salad even better.

If, on the other hand, you’re a mere mortal like me, just use apples.  They keep for-friggin-ever, they’re super easy to peel,² and, because you bought all the stuff I told you to, you have a corer-slicer which will give you beautiful slices in a matter of seconds.  Once you have the slices, take half of them, cut each one into about four chunks each, and use that for your salad.  Eat the rest: they’re yummy.  Adjust amount and size of apple chunks to your taste.

The other fruit we need for this is dried cranberries.  This is the first place we’re going to have to be okay with added sugar, because I’ve never even seen any dried cranberries that were unsweetened ... and, honestly, even if you could find some, you probaly wouldn’t want to eat them.  Even sweetened, they’re not particularly sweet.  The added sugar just makes them tolerable.

The Nuts

You want walnuts for this.  Now, as I mentioned previously, I personally can’t find roasted walnuts—if I could, I sure would buy them.  If you’re ambitious enough to want to roast the walnuts yourself, again I encourage you to do that.  But we’re trying to keep it as simple and pain-free as we can, so I just use raw walnuts.  They’re perfectly lovely.  You bought the pieces, right?  That saves you having to chop them, and they’re usually cheaper to boot.

You could try other nuts, if, say, you really hate walnuts.  But honestly I think that makes it a whole different salad.  Try it at least once with the walnuts.  (Okay, you’ll most likely have to make it with walnuts several times, to use up the whole bag, but that’s not so bad.)  I think you’ll dig it.

The Dressing

For this one, you’re going to want a slightly sweet dressing.  If you really don’t want to make it yourself, you could try a raspberry vinaigrette, or a balsamic fig.³  But it works best with a good honey mustard.

Now, the primary problem with honey mustard dressing is that you can’t actually buy a good honey mustard dressing.  Oh, sure: you can find some decent honey mustard dip ... I like Ken’s, personally.  But if you have a burning desire to slather a chicken nugget in something, there are several good store-bought honey mustard choices.  For salads, on the other hand, most premade “dressings” are totally infeasible.  They’re too thick and goopy—that’s a great quality for a dip, but not really what you want in a salad dressing.  The answer, happily, is simple: make your own.

And it’s also super easy.  You won’t even need the food processor for this one.  Just a bowl and a spoon and a very small amount of elbow grease.  Although we do have to do a little bit of prep work first.  But don’t worry: this is prep stuff you just do occasionally and then you’re set for a while, not stuff you have to do every time you want to make the dressing.

Lemon Juice

Remember when I told you I was going to tell you how to juice your own lemons and it would really easy?  Okay, now’s the time.

Take your lemons and put them on the cutting board.  Slice them all in half around what would be their equators if they were little yellow Earths.  Now take your handy-dandy juicer that I told you to buy and plug it in.  Use the smaller reamer.  Now, one at a time, just put the lemon halves in your palm, put them onto the reamer, and push down.  That’s literally all there is to it.  But I’ll give you a few extra tips:

• You can adjust the basket to allow as much or as little pulp as you like, but for this application you’ll probably want as little pulp as possible.
• Once the pulp starts getting torn out, squeeze the lemon gently to bring more of the pulp into contact with the reamer.
• A good juicer will spin both ways.  Once you feel like you’ve gotten all you’re going to get, lift your hand up, the juicer will stop, and then push down again.  If you’re lucky, it will immediately begin spinning in the other direction.  (If you’re not, you’ll have to lift up and push back down a couple of times.)  It will only take a few seconds for this second reaming, but you may be surprised how much more you get after you thought you were all done.
• I mentioned before that lemon juice will keep forever, but it does eventually get so damned sour that you can’t stand it.  Also, it will develop white solids that you should strain out, because they’re sort of fibrous.  But if all that sounds icky to you, just freeze your lemon juice.  They way I love to do it (when I do do it) is in an ice tray.  Ice cube sizes vary according to tray, of course, but in my experience most ice cubes are almost exactly a tablespoon (a.k.a. 3 teaspoons).  I like the ice trays that have little covers on them, because that way the juice won’t pick up stray flavors, but that’s mostly my anal retentiveness showing.

Homemade Mayo

Now that you have lemon juice, making your own mayonnaise is trivial.  Take a mason jar and crack an egg into it.⁴  Add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice (that’s 2 cubes, if you froze it up above).  Squirt in just a small squirt of mustard: I like brown mustard for this, but any will do.  It’s mainly there for its emulsifying properties.  Toss in a heavy pinch of salt.  Top off with oil up to the 1½ cups line, or maybe a smidge above it.  Many places advise that you let this come to room temperature before proceeding, but I don’t find that it makes much difference (unless you need to wait for the lemon juice cubes to melt, of course).

Now just jam your handy-dandy stick blender (a.k.a. immersion blender) into the jar and turn it on.  Mayonnaise will magically appear.  It’s insane, I tell you.

Tips:

• You can experiment with different types of oil.  Sunflower is probably the best; canola is terrible for you, and olive and grapeseed just taste bad.  Avocado oil is nice, although you will end up with mayo that has a slightly greenish tinge if you use only avocado.  Personally, I like about half-and-half sunflower and avocado.  Occasionally I’ll go a little heavier on the avocado—perhaps to as much as 2/3—but then again I don’t mind greenish mayo.
• Until you’ve done this a couple of times, starting with a smaller amount of oil is better.  You can always add more as you’re blending.  Remember: more oil makes it thicker, which can be a bit counterintuitive if you’re thinking of the oil as a liquid.  But the emulsification of the oil is what makes the mayo, so more is thicker in this case.  Basically, start your blending and, if it’s too thin, add more oil.  If it’s too thick ... well, you’re sort of hosed.  Try again.
• You may need to gently move the stick blender up and down a bit to get the oil on top.  If you’re really good, you can cock the blender at a slight angle and create a vortex that sucks the oil down to the blades, but don’t feel bad if you can’t manage that.  Just plunge up and down a few times (gently) and you’ll achieve the same effect.
• This mayo is absolutely not just for this dressing.  Use it all the time.  Never buy mayo again.  Seriously: once you figure out how easy it is to make your own mayo, there ain’t no going back.

Put it all together

Ready to make some dressing?  Here’s what you’ll need:

• 4 big spoons of homemade mayo
• 1 tablespoon of lemon juice
• 5 big squirts of yellow mustard
• 1 little squirt of dijon mustard
• 4 big squirts of honey
• 2 heavy pinches of garlic powder
• 1 heavy pinch of salt

Just throw it all into a big bowl and stir it up.  The end.  Use a funnel to put it into an old salad dressing bottle and stick it in the fridge; it should last a couple of weeks, but don’t wait too long.

Feel free to mix up the ratio of yellow mustard to dijon, or add or subtract honey to your taste.  You should find this version way more tangy than sweet, but still sweet enough that you know it’s honey mustard.  I’ve also experimented with using vinegar instead of (or in addition to) the lemon juice, which makes it super-extra-tangy, but eventually I decided the lemon juice was the better call.

Don’t leave out the garlic powder though.  I was frustrated for months trying to create the perfect honey mustard before I found some recipe that suggested garlic powder.  Like you probably do, I thought this was an utterly insane idea.  Until I tried it.  Trust me on this one.

Autumn Salad

And now you’re ready.  At this point, you’ve already done the hard bits, so this is just assembly.

• base veggies
• walnuts
• dried cranberries
• feta cheese crumbles
• apple slices
• honey mustard dressing (normal)

There’s sweetness in the apples, the sweetener on the dried cranberries, and the honey in the honey mustard.  There’s also tartness in the cranberries, the feta cheese, and the lemon juice and dijon in the honey mustard.  Plus the crunch of the walnuts and the veggies ... this is one of my favorite “dinner” salads.  As I say, it’s not an everyday thing, but once every few weeks or so it’s a real treat.

Next time, we’ll experiment with some “south of the border” flavors.

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1 But not a fruit salad.  Totally different head.

2 Although, again, if you enjoy eating apple peels, you don’t even need to bother.  But ... blech.

3 Try Annie’s for some quality pre-bottled dressings: they have both of the kinds I mentioned.

4 You don’t have to use a mason jar, of course, but it’s easiest, because it has lines on it for 1 cup, etc.

Saladosity, Part 14: Sweet Tuscany

[This is the fourteenth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


(If you need a refresher about my salad-making lingo, go back and review our first salad.)

Typically, when I want a salad, I want a salad ... you know what I mean?  I’m not dabbling here.  A really good salad is fully worthy of being your entire meal, not just a wimpy side dish.  Still, sometimes you really do need a salad as an accoutrement, or possibly a light snack.  But first, we have to talk about:

Trail Mix

Trail mix is an absolute blessing for people who are trying to snack healthy.  Of course, the vast majority of trail mix that you see in the store has crap like M&Ms in it, which I think defeats the whole purpose.^*  If you get the right blend of dried fruit in with your nuts (and seeds, if you’re into that sort of thing), it’s plenty sweet enough without resorting to crappy chocolate (or even good chocolate).  Now perhaps one day I’ll give you my recipe for what I consider the best trail mix of all time, but for now let me just introduce you to my

Stupid Simple Trail Mix

• 1 part pistachios
• 1 part cashews
• 1 part raisins

Seriously, you can’t get simpler than that.  How big is “1 part”?  Well, however big you want it to be.  I often just make this a quarter cup at a time (so I end up with 3/4 of a cup), but a half cup would work, or a whole cup, even, if you plan to eat it all day long.  Just don’t make so much of it that the nuts have time to go bad.  Also, remember that sunlight is the enemy of nuts, so keep your trail mix in a cool, dark place.  As long as you take that precaution, it’ll last almost forever (unless you ignore my advice and make metric shit-ton of it or something).

Oh, and hey, look: one day is today.  Since this is a fairly short entry in our series, I’m going to throw in my personal favorite trail mix recipe.  It has absolutely nothing to do with salads, but it makes a decently yummy snack that you might eat in between salads.

World’s Awesomest Trail Mix

• 1 cup pistachios
• 1 cup almonds
• 1 cup pecans
• ½ cup cashews
• ½ cup walnuts
• ½ cup nuts of your choice
• 1 cup berry medley
• ½ cup golden berry blend
• 1 tbsp + 1 tsp cinnamon

Now, I know that’s a lot of kinds of nuts.  Trust me, though: it’ll all work out.  That last half cup is dealer’s choice:  Add more almonds if you’re really into almonds.  Throw in something wacky, like hazelnuts or brazil nuts.  I personally like to add a mixture of more almonds and pistachios, and sometimes more pecans as well.  I mix it up.  But the point is, you need a few more nuts to balance out the amount of dried fruit.  Believe it or not, it really is 3 parts nuts to 1 part fruits to achieve the perfect balance.  I suppose your taste may vary—I’ll allow it.  But try it my way first.

For dried fruits, I like the two medleys I listed (both from Trader Joe’s, of course).  The dried berry medley is cherries, blueberries, and strawberries, while the golden berry blend is golden raisins, cherries, cranberries, and blueberries.  However, they both have added sugars, so beware of that if you’re trying to stick to Whole30 rules.  As long as you’re willing to look past that, though, they’re quite excellent, especially with the 2:1 proportion I’m recommending here.  The only real downside is that dried strawberries are HUGE.  It would be nicer if someone were to cut them in half or something.  But I’m too lazy, personally.

The cinnamon is the thing that ties it all together.  It may sound weird at first, but it really does make the whole thing super yummy.  Just dump the nuts and fruits in a big, gallon-size ziploc bag.  Then sprinkle the cinnamon on top and close the bag (don’t squeeze the air out like you normally would—that will come later).  Now just shake the bag like crazy: upside-down, round and round, maybe throw it up in the air a couple of times.  Have fun with it.  Now open the bag again and try your sweet, sweet concoction.  Lick your lips a little.  Now close the bag and store it in a cool, dry place (this time you can squeeze all the extra air out).

Enjoy.

Sweet Tuscan Salad

Now for the main event.  This is our second simplest salad because it uses the second (and final) of our pre-made dressings: Tuscan dressing from Trader Joe’s.  It is literally the only dressing you can get at Trader Joe’s that is really really Whole30 safe.^**  Now, if you don’t know what Tuscan dressing is, it’s kind of like a dressing version of Worcestershire sauce.  Or A1 steak sauce.  Like halfway between Worcestershire sauce and A1 steak sauce, but a bit thinner so it makes a good salad dressing.  So it has a weirdly savory quality to it, which at first you’re going to think will not work with salad.  But bear with me.

• base veggies
• feta cheese crumbles
• simple trail mix
• Tuscan dressing (light)

The key to this salad is the raisins, which provide the perfect couterpoint for the tanginess and umami of the Tuscan dressing, and also using less of the dressing than you thought you needed.  Keep it light people: you want your veggies just barely stained brown here.  Tuscan dressing is one of those things that’s easy to overdo.  But, if you get it just right, it’s totally worth it, because the thing that’s awesome about savory (as opposed to salty and sour and all the rest) is that it makes your mouth water.  So we’re talking about a mouth-watering salad here.  Plus the Tuscan is also a bit salty, the feta is a bit sour, the raisins give you the sweet, and the nuts give you a great crunch.  If you really miss having any bitter to go along with all the other tastes, I guess you could grind some black pepper on it, but I don’t really think it needs it.  A small bowl of this really quenches any mid-afternoon hunger pangs I may be experiencing, so I have a tendency to have this for tea (as the Brits would say).


Next time, let’s get a little more complex and actually make a dressing for a change.

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* Although, if you do insist on sugary things in your tail mix, I recommend Trader Joe’s power berries and possibly some yogurt-covered raisins.
** Recall that our other dressing, the creamy feta cheese dressing, has dairy, which is a no-no for Whole30.  Also recall that my take on Whole30 means I don’t care.