The garden is planted; I spent $7 at the strawberry stand two days ago and haven’t a strawberry left to show for it; Chris can barely breathe and a super helpful gal at the hair salon told him that if he’d just eat local honey, he wouldn’t have allergies anymore. Hey guys, IT MUST BE SPRING! Here’s some food we’ve been eating recently (items you won’t see: honey, strawberries.)
So like a year ago, I heard on America’s Test Kitchen two Israeli cookbook authors (Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi) say that we (Americans?) don’t generally use herbs in our salads and that we can and should make entire salads primarily out of herbs. Challenge accepted! I made this out of baby greens (spinach, mache, swiss chard), basil leaves, and mint leaves. It was…really fragrant. But delicious! LG wouldn’t eat it, though, which was fiiiiiine with me.
I dressed this with some salt, pepper, lemon, and olive oil. Simple, simple.
Okay, so this is not exactly spring-like, but it’s easy and tasty. I buy a package of gnocchi from the pasta aisle, toss it with a can of cannellini beans, a can of tomato sauce or diced tomatoes, and a shitton of greens (5oz. of arugula here.) In this case, I also added pre-cooked meatballs (Aidell’s), but have done sausage in the past or just omitted meat altogether. Just simmer for awhile, season to taste with salt, pepper, crushed red pepper flake, and basil/oregano/Italian seasoning. BOOM.
Top with parmesan cheese (if you have it, which I didn’t, which I know is terrible, and is something that has now been rectified after a trip to Costco this past weekend.)
One of the best meals Chris ever made me when we first started dating was a blackened salmon Caesar salad. We now make some variation of this salad fairly often–blacked chicken breasts, any kind of blackened fish or shrimp, etc. This time we did tri-tip and I made my own Caesar dressing for the first time. I followed Hillary’s recipe for the dressing, although I must admit to omitting the beans, but only because I wasn’t putting beans in the salad and didn’t want to open a can.
Last night was falafel night here. I don’t have a recipe for the falafel, so I busted out my Jewish Cooking cookbook and found that the recipe for falafels was way too involved for me. First of all it used dried chickpeas. Nooooooope. But, I used the same spices that the recipe called for (coriander, cardamom, cumin) and added a little tumeric and crushed red pepper flake. The recipe also called for bulgur, which I didn’t have, so I used couscous instead. Basically, I stuck a can of chickpeas, almost an entire bunch of parsley, cooked couscous, spices, and lemon juice in a food processor and blended it all up. I contemplated baking them for the health factor, but instead fried them up like a real ‘Merican.
With carrot tahini salad, marinated squash and tomatoes, and tzatziki.
What are you cooking recently?