Chicken Salad with Pickled Grapes and Walnuts

When you stock the pantry like I do, it’s important to keep track of the contents and use them within a reasonable timeframe. With ingredients like pickled cherries and grapes, citrus aigre doux, preserved lemons, pickled kumquats, lots of improvisation is possible. The pickled grapes came from a wonderful small volume called Fine Preserving, written by Catherine Plagemann and annotated by M.F.K. Fisher. I’ve gradually been cooking my way through this cookbook, adding another layer of annotations, a project that has been a blast.    

This particular chicken salad came about because I had cooked lunch for a crowd last week and had a couple of cooked chicken breasts left over. I know a good trick to preparing chicken for traditional chicken salad: poach it in the oven bathed in crème fraiche or heavy cream. This method keeps the chicken tender and the resulting juices can be added to the dressing. (Slather the chicken breasts, preferably cut lengthwise if very thick, in cream and bake them at 350 degrees until cooked through, 20-35 minutes depending on the thickness. Shred the while still warm and store with the pan juices poured over them.)

For the dressing, I typically use a combination of mayonnaise and sour cream in equal proportions, flavored heavily with tarragon vinegar and either fresh or pickled tarragon leaves. This time, I used the pickling liquid from the grapes, along with chopped grapes, walnuts, celery and celery leaves.  I know pickled grapes sound like an odd condiment, but they have an alluring flavor — piquant with a hint of spice from the cinnamon stick that goes into the jar.  They were great in the salad, especially with the occasional surprise bite of grapes and the crunch provided by the celery and walnuts.

We served this in typical his and hers mode: his on mini whole wheat pitas with bacon, mine on a crunchy green salad dressed with the grape pickling liquid and walnut oil. 

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Kale Salad with Buttermilk and Preserved Lemon Dressing

This one is for my sister. She e-mailed me a couple of weeks ago raving about a salad that she ate at a restaurant near where she lives in Maryland. She described it as raw kale with a dressing made of buttermilk and preserved lemon and topped with salty granola and sunflower seeds, and asked if I could tell her how to make it. Of course, whoo hoo, my favorite thing to do!

Ingredient detective. Actually, this was all from my imagination since I didn’t actually taste the salad. Therefore, my opinion goes only so far. Everything can be adjusted for taste (saltier, less salty, sweeter, etc.).

The chief challenge for my sister is preserved lemons. This is not a problem for me, since I love this essential ingredient in Moroccan food (and recently in Dorie Greenspan’s use of preserved lemon in her twist on classic French cuisine). I preserve lemon for the pantry regularly (it’s so easy). So knowing that my sister is perennially on a tight budget and shouldn’t be spending $8-12 on a jar of the stuff, I am assuming she can hold out for this salad for a few weeks and make her own (recipe below). A preserved lemon “ah ha” moment for me came a couple of weeks ago while I was making chicken stew à la Dorie, for which she suggested discarding the pulp from preserved lemons to focus on the fermented peel. Discard what? Me? Now this becomes a “waste-not-want-not” proposition. Of course there are good uses for lemon pulp and the unctuous juices. Until that moment, I thought those were equally the point of preserved lemons.

The same philosophy applies to savory, or salty, granola: make your own  (it’s easy and you’ll like it better).

I made a few trials of the dressing. One with preserved lemon pulp and buttermilk alone (too thin), one with preserved lemon pulp and crushed garlic and buttermilk (better flavor, too thin) and another with the addition of a little mayonnaise, which turned out to be the winner since it counterbalances the thickness of kale leaves. For those grossed out by mayonnaise, an emulsion of the core ingredients with olive oil works fine though is less creamy. Your taste.

In terms of technique, one thing I do with kale, and any other tough-leafed green, is to take a small amount of dressing (or just oil and salt) and massage it into the leaves. Let them sit for a bit before adding the rest of the dressing to moisten the salad.  

I know, this is a long-winded explanation of a simple salad.  But thanks to my sister, it’s my new fave: kale, scrubbed with a little buttermilk dressing, doused with a little more and served sprinkled with savory granola made of oats and sunflower seeds. Love it. Go for it sis. I’ll bring you a jar of preserved lemons the next time we get together. Love, K.

Buttermilk and Preserved Lemon Salad Dressing

½ c buttermilk

2 tbsp (or more to taste) liquid and pulp from preserved lemons

Optional: ½ tsp finely diced rind of preserved lemon

1 clove garlic, crushed

1 tbsp mayonnaise (or more if you want it thicker; alternatively use olive oil)

Mix all ingredients and set aside for 10 minutes for the flavors to become acquainted.

Salty Granola

1 c rolled oats, preferably organic

½ c sunflower seeds

1 tbsp white sesame seeds (not hulled)

2 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tbsp + 1 tsp honey

1 tsp salt

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Mix all ingredients together and spread on a baking sheet. Bake, turning once or twice, until browned, about 15-20 minutes.  Watch it once it starts to brown since it will go quickly from that point on.

Preserved Lemons (for one 8-12-ounce jar)

4 lemons, preferably organic and unwaxed

1½ – 2 tbsp salt (smaller amount for an 8-ounce jar, greater for the 12-ounce jar)

If you’re using waxed lemons, wash them in warm water, scrubbing the surfaces and let them dry for several hours or overnight. (You don’t want the residual water to infuse the preserved lemons since it could create mold.)  You are going to need 1-2 lemons for the jar and the rest for juice.

Slice the lemons for the jar pole to pole in quarters or sixths depending on the size of your lemons and jar. Place them in the jar, add the salt, and fill the jar with freshly squeezed lemon juice. Cap the jar tightly and turn it upside down and then right side up to distribute the salt.

Cure the lemons for 3-4 weeks at room temperature, turning the jar upside down and then right side up every day that you can remember. The liquid will turn syrupy and the lemons will be soft and pungent. Store tightly covered in the refrigerator. Preserved lemons keep for many months, even a year.

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Zesty Red Cabbage Slaw

No shrinking violet here. This red cabbage slaw has a pungent kick due to the abundance garlic and anchovies in its dressing. I tamed it down a little by gently heating some of the garlic and melting all of the anchovies in olive oil first. The slightly warm dressing helps to mellow the crisp raw cabbage, which retains its robustness but becomes more palatable. I freshened up the taste with vinegar, a small amount of crushed raw garlic and a big handful of chopped parsley. This keeps well for days and even improves. This is a great salad to perk up dull winter days.

Zesty Red Cabbage Slaw

½ small head of red cabbage

3 cloves garlic, divided (2 and 1)

2 tbsp olive oil

4 anchovies

1 tbsp red wine vinegar

Sal and black pepper

Additional olive oil and vinegar to taste

¼ c chopped parsley or more to taste

Slice the cabbage as thin as you can and set it in a bowl. Chop 2 of the garlic cloves and warm them slowly in the olive oil over low heat to mellow them. Mash the anchovies in the pan and stir to combine them well with the oil and garlic. Remove from the heat and pour over the cabbage, stirring to coat the slices leaves. Add the red wine vinegar and let the mixture sit for 20 minutes or so to relax it. Crush the remaining clove of garlic in a garlic press and stir into the salad. Add pepper and more olive oil and vinegar to taste. It probably won’t need salt because of the anchovies, but that it up to you. Add a big handful of parsley, at least ¼ cup, right before serving. Leftovers keep well in the refrigerator and even improve in texture and flavor.

Serves 4.

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Giardiniera

Garden in a jar. A light and delicious appetizer salad is as picturesque as it is piquant.

For a cocktail party fundraiser in New York last weekend, I was planning to take a large antipasto platter centered on ravioletti (mini raviolis) with sundried tomatoes, tiny balls of mozzarella, and salami, and needed a vegetable counterpoint. While I was fishing the ravioletti from the bottom of the freezer at our posh local Italian deli, I spied giant jars of giardiniera, pickled peppers and mushrooms on top of the freezer cases. Aha. That would be it. 

Giardiniera is a combination of lightly pickled vegetables, usually containing cauliflower, peppers, celery and carrots, and spiked with mustard seeds and hot pepper. It goes together in a snap, cures within a day and keeps for weeks in the fridge. I couldn’t find my notes from the last time I made it but I recalled that the recipe came from Gourmet magazine, and luckily Deb at the Smitten Kitchen blog reproduced a similar recipe, which I used as my guide. Like Deb, I omitted the olives. I was considering omitting the jarred pepperoncini, but added them at the end since their hotness re-balanced the sweetness of the pickling liquid.  My organic veggies were from our CSA and very fresh, so my cooking time was considerably less than the original recipe. Pay attention at the stove!

Giardiniera adapted from Smitten Kitchen and Gourmet

Pickling liquid (see below)

1 large head cauliflower (at least 2 lbs before trimming, about 2 after)

4 medium carrots

4 stalks celery

1 red bell pepper

1 yellow bell pepper

About 8 oz jarred pepperoncini (3/4 of a 12 oz jar, selecting the smallest ones)

Pickling liquid:

2½ c white vinegar

3 c water

¾ c white sugar

5 tbsp Kosher or other coarse salt

1 tsp yellow mustard seeds

½ tsp red pepper flakes (or crushed whole red peppers)

Clean a large (2 quart) jar.

Make and cool the pickling liquid. Bring the ingredients to a boil over medium heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar and salt. Set aside to cool for about 30 minutes.

Prepare the fresh vegetables. Cut the cauliflower into florets of about ¾-1 inch,  saving the large stems and core for another use. Peel the carrots and slice on the diagonal into ½-inch pieces. Trim the celery, pulling off any long strings and slice it on the diagonal to a similar size as the carrots. Remove the stems, seeds and ribs and cut the peppers into 1-inch squares.

Cook the vegetables. Bring a large pot of water (not salted) to a boil. Place a bowl of ice water in the sink.  Cook each vegetable separately until it is crisp tender (err on the side of crisp). Cauliflower and carrots take 3-4 minutes, celery and peppers about 2 minutes. Remove the vegetables quickly to a colander and dunk it in ice water for a few seconds to stop the cooking. Drain well and spread the vegetables on towels to remove as much water as possible.

Assemble the giardiniera. When the vegetables are dry and thoroughly cool, place them in layers in a large (2 quart) jar, adding in the pepperoncini as you go.  Pour the cooled pickling liquid over the vegetables to cover. Cap the jar and refrigerate.  The pickled vegetables will be ready in 24 hours and will keep for a week or two in the refrigerator.

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Kale on Kale: Salad and Pasta, Happy Together

The raw and the cooked. Delicious, complexly flavored pasta with kale and stewed red onions served atop a raw kale salad with garlicky dressing. Topped with delicata squash croutons, a quintessential early fall supper.

This all happened when I came home on a Friday night, fried from a ridiculously busy week, without a clue about what’s for dinner or how many would show up, and knowing that I’d be going to our CSA farm in the morning to face a staggering harvest. Holy cow. Or, as it turned out, holy kale. 

I was craving raw green salad, so kale it would be, dressed in a garlicky sauce. To tame the bite of raw garlic in this dressing, I simmered roughly chopped cloves in olive oil, let them cool and emulsified them with a combination of red wine vinegar and balsamic. With a little salt and pepper, this created a delicious counterpoint to the sturdy kale leaves.  You could pour it on the greens while it’s warm to wilt them slightly, or cool the dressing first.

To dress the pasta, I caramelized thin moon-shaped pieces of red onion, cooking them slowly (15-20 minutes) in olive oil and finishing them with balsamic vinegar. The onions created a sweet note to the lightly stewed kale. Here I preferred wide pasta, fettuccini, which was sprinkled with wonderful toasted butternut squash seed oil from the Finger Lakes district of New York. The company also makes delicata squash seed oil. The combination of textures, flavors and colors created a completely satisfying and nutritious meal. Yum. 

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Summer Bean Salads

A pot of beans is a summer savior.  Cooked dried beans are so versatile that you can use them in a salad, as a side dish, in soup, pureed as an appetizing spread. I like to cook up a whole pot of them over the weekend, which is hardly a burdensome task, and have them available for impromptu uses throughout the week. These are white cannellini beans, or white kidney beans.

The key to flavorful bean salads, in my view, is the dressing.  For one of my recent salads, I used the Fennel à la Grecque that I made earlier in the month. I chopped the fennel pieces, and combined them with beans that were moistened by the poaching liquid, an unctuous combination of olive oil, white wine and lemon. This was a perfect foil to sautéed shrimp, making this a one-dish meal.

The other  salad uses a garlicky dressing that I’ve been making for a while, based on an internet source I no longer can locate. I heated a crushed clove of peeled garlic in olive oil and let it sit for 5 minutes.  I then placed the mixture into my mini-chopper with a few anchovies (you could omit them and use salt but the depth of flavor is very good and it doesn’t make the dressing taste fishy), a splash of vinegar, and some snipped woody herb, like sage or rosemary. Here I used rosemary since I like it with beans and tomatoes, the vegetable I chose to add to the salad.  I brought the refrigerated beans and their liquid to a simmer, drained and reserved the liquid and tossed the beans with the warm dressing to help the flavors become acquainted. When the beans were cool and ready to be served, I checked the seasonings, added a few chopped tomatoes (good use for the millions of cherry tomatoes that crop up at this time of year), and finished it with rosemary leaves.

I served the bean salad on a bed of small kale leaves that had been tossed in the same vinegar. My garden has been producing great kale from the same plants for nearly a year! That’s crazy but true. I’m about to rip them all out and start over but it’s tempting not to after all the hard work to keep them from bolting. 

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Seasonal Potato Salad for your 4th of July Barbecue

Happy Fourth of July!   Here’s a fine, seasonal potato salad that combines fresh-dug potatoes, fresh baby zucchini, snow peas, and herbs. This is a beautiful and tasty salad that transports well to any summer picnic or barbecue. It can withstand the heat, unlike traditional potato salads made with mayonnaise. And it can incorporate other ingredients like green beans and tomatoes later in the season, or beets and cucumbers now.  I would use only three ingredients plus the herbs unless you’re making a giant chopped salad.

Since I prepare each vegetable separately, I cook them in succession in the same pot, a steamer insert into a deep saucepan of boiling water. This saves on cleanup, and water.  I normally would boil potatoes whole and chill them before making potato salad. However, the new red potatoes were so fresh that I cubed and steamed them. When tender but not mushy, the potatoes were placed in a serving bowl and sprinkled with salt and white wine vinegar while warm (I used my flavorful homemade chive vinegar). By the way those little red potatoes that are sometimes called new potatoes are not necessarily new, but rather small, just like those awful bagged mini carrots that aren’t baby carrots but older carrots cut and tumbled to look new because of their size. 

The cubes of zucchini were also steamed, then salted and sprinkled with olive oil. The peas were simply plunged into boiling water.  Finally, the vegetables were tossed together with a little more vinegar and olive oil and sprinkled with fresh herbs. 

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How to Eat Your Lawn: A Salad of Bittercress and Violets

I don’t weed my lawn. I eat it. One of the earliest food crops in my yard is bittercress, a member of the Cruciferae family of green plants (think mustard). It’s a pretty invasive plant that enjoys cold and wet conditions such as those we typically experience at this time of year. Reviled as a weed or served as a lightly spicy precursor to watercress and arugula, bittercress is useful as a garnish when parsley and other herbs are fast asleep. It keeps well so I harvest a bunch before the plants go to seed and keep it in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks.

Then there are dandelion leaves to harvest, before the plants get large and flower. If you’re trying to eliminate them from your lawn, this is a good time to dig them up since the roots are still shallow. The leaves are edible (as are the flowers) and make a good salad ingredient.  Later, when they’re larger, I’ll wilt them in a bacon and vinegar dressing, but right now they’re very tender so I leave them as is. And now, violets are just beginning to show their flowers. When the violet flowers first come out, the tiny leaves are tender and delicious so I harvest them for my foraged salad along with a few pretty blossoms. I also added a few kale trimmings from my awakening garden. Dressed lightly in oil and vinegar, this small-portion salad packs a lot of flavor and signals that spring is really here. 

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Lentils with Sour Cherries, Bacon and Blue Cheese

Bursting with sweet, sour, smoky and salty flavors, this salad is a riff on a delicious-sounding recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi (The Cookbook), I used my home-pickled sour cherries instead of his dried cherries, vinegar and sugar. A new crop of cherries is still months away, but I’m already plotting what to make with them based on the contents of my pantry.  The cherries are wonderful by themselves, served alongside a pate or rillettes, as I did with duck around the holidays.

 But what to do with the juice? It is too good to throw away. You can combine it with seltzer water, making a “shrub” to drink, which is probably what will happen after the cherries are consumed. Here it’s used as the basis for a salad dressing that infuses warm lentils with great flavor before they are combined with local smoky organic bacon and some local blue cheese that I bought last weekend at a Slow Food winter farmers’ market. Tossed with baby spinach, this could be a complete meal, although I garnished ours with a cube of pan-roasted wild salmon.

 The dressing starts with cooking chopped shallots in olive oil until light brown. To that, I added pickled sour cherry juice and chopped cherries and cooked it down a bit.  I thought it would be a little too sweet so I added a splash of red wine vinegar.  Ottolenghi’s version used dried sour cherries, red wine vinegar and sugar.  He also used a much greater proportion of bacon and cheese than I did.

Lentils with Sour Cherries, Bacon and Blue Cheese adapted from Ottolenghi

¾ c organic French lentils (such as Puy)

1½ tbsp olive oil

1 shallot, peeled and finely chopped

¼ c juice from pickled sour cherries (or 2 tbsp red wine vinegar and 2 tbsp water)

2 tbsp chopped pickled sour cherries (or chopped dried sour cherries and 1 tsp sugar)

Salt

Red wine vinegar

1-2 pieces of smoked bacon, cooked and drained

2 tbsp creamy blue cheese

Freshly ground black pepper

Handful of spinach leaves

Rinse the lentils and place them in a pot, covered with twice the depth of water. Simmer for about 20 minutes until tender but not falling apart. Drain the lentils and toss with the warm dressing and set aside to cool.

Make the dressing while the lentils are cooking. Slowly cook the chopped shallots in olive oil until light brown. Add the pickled cherries and juice (or red wine vinegar, water and dried cherries) and cook slowly until slightly reduced.

When ready to serve, taste the lentils and adjust the seasonings with a little salt (remember that the bacon and cheese will add salt) and a splash of red wine vinegar. Cut the bacon and cheese into pieces and add to the lentils, along with freshly ground black pepper. Add a handful of spinach and toss. If too dry, add a little oil and vinegar or cherry juice.

Serves 2 as a meal or 4 as a side dish.

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Spiced Seckel Pears

Another in a series in which I comment on M.F.K. Fisher’s 1986 annotations of Catherine Plagemann’s 1967 Fine Preserving, layering past and present, research, experimentation and outright opinion. This project is a blast.

 

Slightly tipsy table talk over the holidays made a few tongue twisters of our pickled Seckels. You can just imagine. I put these up in mid-fall when local Seckel pears were still available and served them in sweet and savory combinations. Plagemann describes the results as “rich, spicy and good, and an attractive brown color.” Contrarian Fisher says “they are little dry warped things …(with) strong hard little bits in them like grains of sand.” But she is forgiving since her mother “loved them, so all was well.”

I agree with the mixed results, but I think they were my doing, not a flaw in the idea or the process. Plagemann peeled her pears and I didn’t, resulting in a shriveled appearance and a slightly dense coating. This was actually more of a cosmetic problem than a flavor problem but it did affect the texture. The pears are poached in a combination of white wine vinegar and brown sugar with cloves and cinnamon sticks. The poached pears are ladled into hot jars and the hot pickling liquid is reduced and poured on top. I let them sit for a couple of months, with the result that the liquid permeated the fruit and all of the graininess that Fisher feared was gone. Plagemann was right about that. 

I will make these again, but need to work on the type and amount of vinegar and sugar, the preparation of the pears and maybe some alternative spices. I served them semi-successfully with ice cream and cookies (too vinegary) and very successfully in a salad of winter-friendly bitter greens topped with the pears, toasted walnuts and blue cheese. Plagemann says to save the liquid for a basting sauce. She suggests ham. Hmmm. Not this generation.

Spiced Seckel Pears from Catherine Plagemann

12 Seckel pears

1½ c white wine vinegar

2 c dark brown sugar

1 tsp whole cloves from which the heads are removed (so as not to cloud the syrup)

1 two-inch stick cinnamon, broken into pieces

Peel enough pears to pack a quart jar. Bring the vinegar, sugar and spices to a boil and add the pears. Lower the heat and poach the pears gently until easily pierced by a cake tester. Do not overcook.

Meanwhile, prepare the jar by washing it, filling it with boiling water and draining it.

Place the pears in the prepared jar. Bring the pickling syrup to a boil and pour over the pears , shaking the jar gently to remove air pockets. Seal the jar and set aside for about a month before using.

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