Today's high-protein lunch: Tuna and Bean Salad

Quick, flavorful and pairs well with winter storage foods like the side of roasted root vegetables at today's lunch at home. I could see myself eating this on a bed of lettuce or sprouts, or with a side of some fresh pear or apple slices. The Meyer lemons I purchased this time were pretty orange, so the color contrast of parsley and lemon zest was attractive.

Tuna and White Bean Salad with Lemon and Parsley
serves 2 as main dish, 4 as small plate with greens/sprouts

30 oz cooked white beans or 2 15-oz cans cannelini beans, rinsed and drained
1 5-oz can tuna
1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped
zest and juice of one Meyer lemon
olive oil, salt and pepper to taste
1 very small clove garlic, minced (optional)

Combine beans, tuna and chopped parsley in a bowl. Whisk together the lemon zest, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper (and garlic, if using). Taste for seasoning and adjust if desired, then pour the dressing over the bean mixture and toss.

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How much more awkward-sounding can the name of this salad be?

A mixed-bean salad with garbanzos, kidney beans and green beans and a pickled-tasting sauce is a common player on potluck tables in my area. It's an old standby, everyone sees the contents and knows what the salad is going to taste like. I felt like making one that had a bit more crunch, no obvious sweetness (my least favorite part of some versions of bean salad) and used the spicier pickle flavor of my own home-canned green bean pickles. 

The bean pickles are one of my favorite recipes from the Bernardin Guide to Home Preserving, one of my souvenirs from living in Canada. The original recipe is called Dilled Beans, but I use the variation called Hot 'n Spicy Beans, skipping the red pepper strips and the dill. The recipe also worked this year with purple beans, which make me sad by doing the same thing purple asparagus does: turn green when cooked.

When asked at the potluck supper what name this dish has, I responded, "Bean, uh ... bean and bean salad." There are three beans, but do you think my brain could add them up in the necessary moment to say something succinct like Triple-bean Salad? Uh ... nope. 

Bean, Bean and Bean Salad with Carrots
serves 6 to 8

1 15-oz can garbanzos (chickpeas)
1 15-oz can Great Northern beans
3 small garden carrots, julienned (about 1/2 cup julienne)
1/2 pint home-pickled spicy green beans with garlic 
1 clove pickled garlic from the jar of home-pickled beans
4 to 5 Tbsp pickle juice from the jar of home-pickled beans
4 Tbsp olive oil
2 pinches dried epazote
salt and pepper to taste

Place all beans and carrots together in a bowl. Whisk together pickle juice with minced pickled garlic, olive oil, epazote and some salt and pepper. Pour over beans and mix thoroughly. Add more salt and pepper if required. Allow salad to sit overnight in the dressing before serving.

Note: the epazote could be replaced by dried basil, savory or thyme for a different flavor.

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Monster Beets!

Just had to post an amusing picture from last fall at work. Kelly and I are posing with some beets from Jane's Garden. I've been thinking a lot about those crazy super-sized beets because this year's beets have been just normal ones.
Thanks to Jackie Pope-Ganser for the photo.

When you get monster beets, it's time to use just one to make a big salad. Here's a recipe I use at home. I'm changing the title to commemorate the beets.

Monster Beet and Apple Salad

One monstrously-large beet, peeled and ends cut off
3 to 4 crunchy eating apples (examples: Fuji, Jonathan), peeled and cored
1 bulb fennel (optional), save the feathery fronds
balsamic vinegar
sugar
salt
fresh-ground black pepper
walnut oil (tastes the best, but olive oil will also serve)
walnut pieces (optional)

Grate the beet into a bowl, using the large holes on your grater. You may need to cut it into smaller pieces to hold onto it while you grate. Grate the apples into the bowl. If you are using the fennel, cut off the stalks, cut the bulb in quarters and cut out the cores. Then slice very thinly.
In another bowl, pour in a few tablespoons of vinegar and add pinches of sugar and salt until it has a taste you find pleasantly tart and lightly sweetened. Season with pepper and then whisk in oil in small batches until the dressing emulsifies. Mix the dressing with the beets and apples and walnut pieces (if using). Use the fennel fronds for a garnish or mix them in with the whole salad.

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Today's summery salad

I typically assemble salads according to my whims and what's in the refrigerator/cupboard. The only real planning involved is how to obtain the salad greens: backyard, CSA, friends or shopping?

The basic principles: Using whatever is around, find some textural variety, a mix of sweet and sour and savory, and make a homemade vinaigrette or a creamy dressing based on kefir, yogurt or mayonnaise.

Apples, berries, pears and dried fruits are frequent attenders in the sweet category, as is honey in the vinaigrette dresing. Textural variety is provided by mixed greens, edible flowers, nuts, fruits (fresh or dried), crunchy or fibrous vegetables like cucumber or raw zucchini or bell pepper or carrot, and, occasionally, cheese.

In keeping with the basics of "whatever ya got" and switching up the flavors and textures, today's salad was a greens mix of half lettuce, half sorrel. It was topped with fresh blueberries, pecan pieces and cucumber batons, with a honey-sweetened balsamic vinegar-Dijon vinaigrette spiked with a little lime juice.

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Easter menu: violets and some other food

It's the start of the third year of having a yard without chemicals like fertilizer or pesticide (I don't know what the previous owners did, so I'm starting from when we moved in). To celebrate, this year we're eating edible flowers that appear in the yard.

At the special Easter lunch I made for myself and my husband, violets were the stars. They are the first of the edible flowers to show up in the spring. We went out in the morning to pick a bowl of the teeny purple flowers from our backyard.

In documenting the Easter lunch here, let's start with dessert. I found a recipe for flower pudding with dates and spices in Lorna Sass' To the King's Taste, a collection of recipes from the time of King Richard II of England and Sass' modern interpretations of the recipes. The original recipe called for roses, but Sass indicated violets might be appropriate in early spring, so I tried it out. Into the saucepan go the flowers and some almond milk along with thickeners, spices, and sweeteners.

After chilling and setting and a bit of garnishing with some fresh flowers, here's the end result:

This dish did not meet expectations, but I would not call it a failure. The pudding is delicious despite the drawbacks of its slightly grayish purple color and the fact that the pudding ends up tasting much more like dates than like violets, which have a very light and subtle flavor that may have been destroyed by cooking. I'll try the same recipe again in a few weeks when the first roses bloom and see if the stronger flavor of roses holds up better in the pudding.

Violets turned up again in the first course of lunch, which was spring mix greens and sauteed asparagus with a balsamic vinegar reduction sauce.

Next year, I'm going to have to pick more violets for salads. They are fantastic with greens!

The usual main attraction of Easter dinner, the ham, was hardly an afterthought, it just didn't have the same level of novelty as the edible flowers. I've never made a glazed ham before, and Andrew and I recalled Easter hams of our growing-up years were unglazed. I pulled the basic ham glaze ideas from  Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook of 1950 and dressed it up with balsamic vinegar. It was served with buttered peas with caramelized shallots.

Final verdict from the eaters? Glazed ham is here to stay on our Easter menu, for as long as we don't mind all our ham leftovers being a little sweet. The payoff of taste sensations was definitely worth the extra effort of pulling out the ham in the middle of baking, scoring and glazing. Also, I love how the pink and green food looks so appetizing on my pink-and-white china.

Wine served: a surprisingly apt German Riesling from the Mosel, Ernst Loosen's Dr. L from 2010. Hooray to the liquor store that has everything, including good wine recommendations for ham!

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Mmm, mystery greens

So many greens in this week's CSA box, by two days later I had forgotten exactly what they are all called. I recognized the kale and napa cabbage right away in the fridge, but what kind of green was I using today when I made a salad for a potluck? Tatsoi? Komatsuna? Some kind of choi?

I told everyone who liked the salad that I think it was komatsuna. For anyone here who is going to try to reproduce this recipe, sorry if it's not komatsuna and you get different results.

Mystery Greens Salad
at least 6 servings

1 large bunch komatsuna (or whatever brassica leaf I was using), about two handfuls
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 Tbsp lemon juice
pinch chili powder
handful of raisins
handful of roasted salted almonds

Cut greens into thin ribbons with a knife and place in a bowl. Whisk together the oil, lemon juice and chili powder and pour over the greens. Toss to dress, then garnish with raisins and almonds. Can be made a few hours ahead.

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Feeding ourselves with weeds

"I've been working hard this week to clear out the pigweed from my garden," my Grandpa Possehl told me last week. "Friends tell me the restaurants in Chicago will charge top dollar to let you eat it, but they use a different name for it. Starts with a P -- purl-something, pers-something, sounds kinda like parsley, but that's not it."

"Purslane?" I asked, thinking of recipes I'd read from the 1500s using that name in the ingredient lists. It appears in spring salad greens recipes, among a long list of garden herbs and members of the allium family. Lettuce is there, too, but it takes a back seat in importance.

"Yeah, that's it. A chef uses the fancy name and will pay a lot for it as a delicacy, but down on the farm we just called it pigweed, and I just pull it out in bunches and throw it out."

I jumped at the chance to taste something I'd only read about before. I wasn't even sure which weed it was until Grandpa described it. Here's a picture taken at the University of Illinois. He gamely volunteered to pull some and send it home with me along with some fresh mixed lettuces from the garden. He chuckled as he put it into a plastic bag and told Grandma, "I'm giving Heather some of that pigweed out of the garden to eat. Heck, if she likes it well enough, I'll give her a whole big garbage bag next time." As I left for home with the bag, both of them grinned conspiratorially as if they'd just gotten away with a practical joke. "Hope you like the pigweed."

My husband and I mixed together the lettuce leaves and the purslane leaves stripped from the vines and ate them with homemade dressing yesterday for dinner and today for lunch. Turns out Andrew's instincts for making salad dressing correspond with 15th Century English tastes. He mixed a dressing of about half white wine vinegar and half olive oil and salt.

The verdict? Grandpa, you should start exporting your pigweed to fancy restaurants. It's delicious! Next time purslane comes up on its own in a part of the yard or the garden box where I could afford to let it grow bigger, I'm keeping it. It is a tender green (comes from being a succulent plant that stores moisture in its leaves to use in dry times), and its tangy flavor is very similar to clover leaves, which I occasionally enjoy eating freshly plucked from the lawn.

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Chopped Salad: low on lettuce, high in flavor

Dinner that was a big bowl of salad (especially mixing fruit and lettuce) was a specialty of mine when I was single, but I dropped the habit when I started having some digestive difficulties that were exacerbated by high-insoluble-fiber leafy greens. This week, after re-reading a Cook's Illustrated article from a few years ago about chopped salads, I was inspired to play around with one of the recipes to make it my own and use items I had at home. The chopped salads are mostly stuff that is not lettuce, which got my attention.

Since seeing some improvements this year in my ability to tolerate foods that were formerly banned from the grocery list, I decided to give lettuce a chance in my dinner salad last night, but as a supporting actor only, not in a main role. When preceded by a Scandinavian crispbread as a tummy-friendly starter, last night's salad was a star.

Pears and More Chopped Salad
4 large servings or 6 side portions

1 English salad cucumber, seeded and cubed
3 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
3 Tbsp white wine vinegar
kosher salt
fresh-ground black pepper
1 red bell pepper, seeded and cut into 1/4-inch pieces
2 Bartlett pears, cored and chopped into 1/4-inch pieces (could substitute 2 crisp apples)
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1 small head green leaf lettuce, torn into bite-sized pieces
4 ounces crumbled Amish blue cheese
1/4 cup chopped pecans

Whisk oil and vinegar together in a large bowl. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Add cucumber, bell pepper, pear, toss and let stand a few minutes. Toss in lettuce, then pecans and cheese.

Best served immediately, but leftovers do keep overnight for a tangy lunch if you don't mind lettuce that is a little limp.

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The impermanence of purple asparagus

Enjoy the purple color of purple asparagus in the store, in the fridge, in pieces in the prep bowl. Take a picture and admire the color while you can, because as soon as the purple asparagus is cooked, it turns into green asparagus.

Asparagus Salad with Southeast Asia Sauce and Sesame Oil

one pound green or purple asparagus

1 tsp Thai fish sauce

1 Tbsp toasted sesame oil

1/4 tsp fresh grated ginger

juice of 1/2 lime

1 tsp honey

Snap tough stem ends off washed asparagus. Break spears into bite-sized chunks. Steam until crisp-tender, about five to seven minutes. Whisk together the dressing ingredients and toss with steamed asparagus. Serve warm or cold.

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What to call this potato salad?

So far, this potato salad

has no well-written recipe, and no name. I threw the sauce for it together in a bit of a hurry to get out the door and on to my birthday hike and picnic in the county park yesterday.

The ingredient list, use these items to taste:
potatoes, scrubbed and boiled with skins on in salted water, then chilled and chopped
mayonnaise
plain yogurt
finely chopped pickles (I used kosher dills)
Worcestershire sauce
freshly ground black pepper
spicy brown mustard (I used a mix of store-bought and homemade-by-friend spicy brown mustards)
cider vinegar
fresh rosemary (from my herb pots), chopped very fine
fresh parsley (from my herb pots), chopped
fresh cilantro, chopped

Salad tasted wicked spicy and reeked of rosemary when the dear husband and I ate it three hours after mixing, but mellowed out and tasted more blended and mustardy on Day Two. Obligatory food safety tip: with salads dressed in mayonnaise, be sure that they are kept very cold in your picnic cooler and aren't left outside the cooler more than half an hour before or after serving.

I'll measure the ingredients next time. So far, the best name I've come up with is a pretty lame pun: "Herb-y Birthday" Potato Salad. Any suggestion from the readers?

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Simple side dish: apple salad

3 apples (I think the ones we had on hand were Gala)

2 to 3 Tbsp cherry wine vinegar (gift from in-laws)

1 Tbsp olive oil

2 tsp apple butter (gift from neighbor)

honey to taste

pinch of orange zest (my zester yields long strands of zest, very pretty in this)

pecan halves, chopped, to garnish

Core and chop apples, but leave the peels on. Whisk together vinegar, oil, apple butter, honey, orange zest. Add apple chunks and toss till they are covered in dressing. Sprinkle with pecans.

Keeps well for a couple of days, maintains most of apples' crunch.

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