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Archive for the ‘Summer salads’ Category

Stoic the Vast and Dora the Explorer; Tomato-cornbread salad

Here’s the thing: A whole lot of stuff does not matter once you get past, say, the quarter-century mark. My husband, Stoic the Vast, thinks that applies to everything (that it doesn’t matter), but he’s wrong. Some things do matter, just not the way people behaved in your high school class 50 years ago.

My classmates Mary and Barb and Mary’s 94-year-old mum, Elizabeth.

As Stoic likes to remind me, our brains aren’t fully formed until we’re in our mid-20s so when we were 16, 17 and 18, we were pretty much idiots. Actually, it seems like I must have been rather a rude idiot because there were more than a few women who looked at me sideways with no love at all. I obviously dismissed them as not important and must still because I don’t remember any of their names after spending 4 days with them last week. A whole lot of my classmates are a whole lot nicer than I am and, consequently, seem to have a whole lot more fun. Hmmmmm.

The woman on the back of whose neck I wrote  with ballpoint pen is still friendly, who knows why? Which is good because I liked her then and enjoy her mordant wit now.

My entire reunion experience was a lot like Liz Lemon’s on “30 Rock” according to our youngest, Dora the Explorer. Most of my classmates thought Stoic was in our class and liked him a lot, and I found out I, too, was not especially nice unless it suited me. Hmmmm.

I think now, after those 4 days and driving about 1200 miles, that my family and the times were more to blame for my unhappiness than my classmates. As Stoic told me every time we went anywhere in a bunch, “These are some really nice people.”

We had just over 100 in our Class of ’62. Twelve have died, and yet 69 came back so that was most of us.  Stoic is very fond of the food in central Pennsylvania, and we ate a lot of it.

Thursday dinner through Sunday brunch I managed my eating. Once we got in the truck Sunday midday, though, all bets were off. I ate too much on the road and then again Monday but pulled myself back up onto the wagon on Tuesday with no great damage done. When I overeat, I not only don’t lose weight, I feel lousy, too. Slowly, slowly, it is dawning on me that I do myself no favors over-eating and under-sleeping.

I walked in Pennsylvania and have walked since at home. I’m getting ready to go yank weeds for an hour. I’ve entered my calorie and water intake on livestrong.com. The reunion was not the end of my taking care of myself but, I hope, a lengthy beginning.

And with Dora about to leave for four months in East Africa, my world feels like a friendlier place.

We came home to wheelbarrows-ful of tomatoes and there’s nothing better you can do with them than this allrecipes.com salad. Recipe says it makes 10 servings, but that would be 10 servings for mice only, not hungry persons. The avocado and the cornbread combined make something celestial.

Tomato-cornbread salad with avocado and cilantro

5 cups 1/2-inch cornbread cubes

1-1/2 pounds tomatoes, stemmed, skinned, seeded and cut into medium dice

Salt to taste

2 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 red onion, cut into small dice

1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro

2 avocados, cut into medium dice

1/4 cup olive oil

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

Ground black pepper to taste

Heat oven to 250°. Place cornbread cubes on rimmed cookie sheet; bake until bread dries out, about 30 minutes, then set aside to cool. Salt tomatoes, stir in garlic and let stand until juicy, about 30 minutes. Drain off liquid. Toss onion, cilantro, avocado, olive oil and vinegar with tomatoes. Add pepper and adjust salting. Add bread; toss. Let stand 10 minutes before serving.

And to think I’ve never liked cilantro before this summer!

 

Category:

Aging, Handling anxiety without food, Maintaining weight loss, Salad, Summer salads, Warrior Run High School Class of '62

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2 pounds and 2 weeks ’til reunion!

Here comes the sun! Several kinds of sunflowers beginning to bloom with red and white okra at their knees.

I wonder if any other of my classmates has to buy a new fence charger before our 50th reunion in 2.5 weeks. When I went out to put on fly masks this morning, we had a free range quarterhorse, and it will not do if any of our three amigos range onto N. Meadow Rd. while we’re in Pennsylvania.

I wonder a lot of things.  This is kinda like a mega-blind date with 100 or so people I knew a lifetime ago. Who will have grown into really interesting adults? Who will have worked really, really hard at staying the same people they were at 17 and 18? Who’s died? Who’s better than ever? (Is that possible?) Can I have a real conversation with anyone (remember, we’ll be only 90 miles from Penn State)?

Will the guys who called me Baby Huey in 9th and 10th grades repeat it, still thinking it’s so funny? How will I handle it if they do, understanding, of course, that they can only hurt the 14- and 15-year-old in me, not the 67-year-old who’s a year younger than they are, who still has her hair, who shared a Plaza Hotel bathroom with Harrison Ford and who’s within 2 pounds of her 24 years ago wedding weight!

Like so many high schoolers — maybe most — I felt I fit in nowhere (except on a stage so I was always singing somewhere). I didn’t date; I didn’t go to a prom or any of the near-constant dances, all of which required not just a date but a boyfriend. (I am so, so happy that seems to have changed, and many, if not most, of my young friends at church went to their proms this year in flocks of friends.)

I was smart, and the ’50s and ’60s were not a time for girls/women to be bright.   Boys had to do better and be taller, be the ones to talk about themselves on dates (for those who dated).  I had some kind friends, male and female, and it’s for them I’m going back.

Because why? Because I’m curious. Because I want to know that our small group is happy (although I think “happy” is a meaningless construct), healthy and still interested in our world, still taking classes or lessons, still riding our bikes, in good relationships with our spouses, our children and/or  grands if we have them, not complaining about our joints, still laughing, still kind. I want to be with people who share some of my same memories, people who remember me at 16. I want to be inspired and to inspire.

And if I were honest, I’d admit I’d like to see some people really miserable. Proof that karma’s a bitch and all that.

I want to re-visit my younger self, wear that ugly 1962 senior picture on my ID badge and make peace with her. Applaud her and tell her she did the best she could with what she had. Tell her I understand how very difficult it was to be her 50 years ago and if anybody calls her Baby Huey, cold-cock ‘em with my newly tanned and muscled arm.

**********

In the meantime, nourishing that kick-ass body, I made this salad last night with leftover corn frozen on July 4 and with the last of our 2011 green beans. Corn had been cooked on the cob and beans, blanched when frozen so I did no further cooking.  Both need at least a 2-minute blanching.

This recipe ran in EatingWell magazine in 1995 and The Essential EatingWell Cookbook (2004) as well. I don’t think the amount or proportion of beans and corn matters much — I used roughly half and half which is more corn than recipe calls for.  But it’s just like any salad — your creation. We enjoyed it with tilapia fillets baked in cumin-, cilantro- and jalapeno-laced tortilla chips.

Green bean salad with corn, basil and black olives (see caption)

2 pounds green beans, trimmed

3 ears corn, husked, blanched and cut from cob

1/2 small red bell pepper, finely chopped

1 small red onion, finely chopped (I used scallions)

2/3 cup black olives, halved and pitted (wish I’d had)

1/3 cup chopped fresh basil

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

2 cloves garlic, minced

Hot sauce, such as Tabasco, to taste

Salt and freshly ground papper, to taste

Leftovers make a perfect summer lunch with slices of ripe avocado.

Combine bell pepper, onion, olives, basil, oil, vinegar, lemon juice and garlic in appropriately sized bowl. Toss to mix well. Season with hot sauce, salt and pepper. Toss in corn and beans. Cover and refrigerate to let flavors blend. With proportions given, makes 6 to 8 servings.

 

 

Category:

Salad, Simple foods, Summer salads, Uncategorized, vegetables, Weight loss, Why overweight?

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Blue nights, golden days and a 21st-century three-bean salad

Joan Didion has always been a bit diaphanous, a bit hide-and-seek for my tastes,  probably never more so than in “Blue Nights” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), a gauzy remembrance of the 2005 death of her daughter, Quintana Roo. You have to Google Quintana Dunne Michael to find out how she died. Her grief-stricken mother offers only shadowy hints of suicide, alcoholism, mental illness, maybe because a terrible chain of several incidents preceded Quintana’s death. This allows the writer-mother to circle — were the incidents related, weren’t they? — poetically or with preciosity, depending on your bent. All I’m sure of is that I never want the opportunity to write such a work.

“The name of the condition that seemed to apply was this: ‘borderline personality disorder.’ Skipping to a 2001 New England Journal of Medicine review of John G. Gunderson’s  book on same, Didion quotes: “Such patients may seem charming, composed, and psychologically intact one day and collapse into suicidal despair the next…Impulsivity, affective lability (unstable emotions), frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, and identity diffusion are all hallmarks.”

I see myself in varying degrees at varying points of my life in that description. Quintana Dunne Michael died at 39. I’m going to be 67 next month and have had some time to level out, something my shrink promised 25 years ago would eventually happen. And, look, he was right again!

In Didion’s single brief mention of her daughter’s drinking she says, “She was depressed. She was anxious. Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much. This was called medicating herself. Alcohol has its own well-known defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested — ask any doctor — that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.”

Substitute “eating and food” here for “drinking and alcohol.” As the problem with all the Just Say No-type drug education programs is that they’ll never say how good it feels when you do most drugs (at least immediately afterward if not long-term), I don’t know a weight loss program that says food, also, is a most effective anti-anxiety agent.

You’re anxious. You eat. You eat some more. You decide to skip the walk and eat even more. Pretty soon you’re Jabba the Hutt. You’re grotesque, but you’re not anxious —  just ill-tempered and large.

Now, to Dr. Oz’s diet “secrets” in this Parade magazine two Sundays ago. He always eats carrots and plain almonds for snacks, he says, because he doesn’t want joy associated with food. That’s nuts, and I don’t mean almonds.

I want a life that’s more than food, and that life must be joyful. One of the joys of life is good food, especially when shared with good friends and/or family.

This was a joy — to put together this glammed-up three-bean salad with green beans, peas and baby red onions (all from the Thursday evening farmers’ market in Statesville, NC). Along with many, many traditional recipes, three-bean salad needs to be dragged into the 21st century with its crisp, fresh tastes and somewhat lighter calorie counts. This one’s a winner — so good that He Who Makes Faces at Green Beans packed some in his lunch for work.

Three-bean salad for the times

6 pieces bacon, cooked and drained on paper towels, crumbled, drippings reserved

1 pound fresh green beans, washed, trimmed and snapped into bite-size pieces

4 small red spring onions, thinly sliced

2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

Salt and pepper to taste

1 pounds sugar peas, shelled, steamed for 2 minutes, plunged into ice water and drained after cooling

1 14-3/4-ounce can black beans, rinsed and drained

2 tablespoons canola oil

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

After cooking bacon, saute onions, garlic and green beans in drippings. Pat dry with paper towels when beans are crisp-tender. Toss green beans with cooked peas, black beans, oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Taste for seasoning and adjust if necessary. Cover tightly and chill for several hours to allow flavors to meld.

Garlic from the garden, waiting to be braided. Hat full of lavender, Texas tarragon, oregano and sage blossoms.

 

Category:

Seasonal food, Stress eating, Summer salads, Why overweight?

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Zucchini fettucine and sick of the seesaw

I am not tired of summer squash but I am so tired of watching the same numbers on the bathroom scales: 201, 202, 204, 203, 201, over and over and over for a couple weeks now. I’ve thought about writing my next major goal — 199 — on my palm with a Sharpie like the Biggest Loser contestants, but then everyone will know what I weigh. Wait……

As my friend Jody J. once said to me in the newsroom, “Do you think people don’t know you’re overweight?” Yes, and –  magical fat-person thinking at its best — if I don’t say anything, they won’t. Same principle as never looking lower than my face in the mirror.

He Who Has Never Struggled with his Weight (only argued with it briefly a time or two) says I should get on those scales only once a week. Reshaping psyche and self, I feel like the YouTube kitty scrambling up the slippery slide. If I give up one of my tentative “holds” (read: control), I’ll be back at the bottom more quickly than that determined kitty.

Of course, to tell the truth (ick!) I seem to be in a pretty adversarial relationship with the uphill slope: trying to see what I can get away with, etc., instead of acknowledging with my whole being that this is what’s good and healthy and productive for me. Instead of being excited that it’s “working,” being bummed that change (ick again!) takes time and patience and work. Sigh.

I would not change (smooth segue, eh?) the continuing summer squash stream from garden to kitchen. Today’s recipe for zucchini fettucine is from Weight Watchers (July-August magazine) via the lovely and talented Eleanor P. of Potomac, MD.

Zucchini “fettucine”

1/3 cup unseasoned rice vinegar

4 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

2 shallots, peeled and thinly sliced

4 green small to medium zucchini, ends trimmed

4 golden zucchini or yellow squash, trimmed

1 cup flat-leaf parsley leaves, washed, patted dry and minced

1 medium to large vine-ripe tomato, seeded and diced

6 tablespoons crumbled low-fat goat or feta cheese

Make dressing by whisking together vinegar, oil, salt and pepper. Stir in shallot slices. With your vegetable peeler, peel squash lengthwise into ribbons, stopping at seeded centers (discard these). Combine squash strips and parsley with dressing and toss. Let stand until flavors blend, a few minutes, and divide among 4 serving bowls. Top evenly with tomato and cheese. 176 calories, 9 grams total fat per serving.

 

 

Category:

healthy cooking, Local food, Seasonal food, Summer salads, vegetables, Weight loss

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World’s best chicken salad and how/why we cook/eat

Two recent cartoons in The New Yorker pretty much sum it up: PC Vey’s cranky cook saying to the man behind her at the stove: “Not now — I’m cooking to avoid intimacy.”

And in the Pat Byrnes’ cartoon  the female cook asks an anxious-looking man, “How am I supposed to cook? The Internet is down.”

Avoiding intimacy is probably the Number One reason for burying our timid selves alive in sarcophagi of fat. It makes it really problematic for others to burrow in — either physically or psychically. And when we emerge from the tomb — should we be so lucky — we are adrift in a sea of new and unaccustomed feelings. Swamped, even.

That’s how I’m feeling after getting ready of  just 31 pounds: as though the filter between my brain and mouth has been removed for cleaning and, just now, there is none. Anything I think, pretty much is gonna come out and that’s not always a good thing. For instance, He Who Is a Rec0vering Baptist (and tobacco chewer) suggests I not go to any more funerals for a while or I’m going to be perceived as a genuinely Crazy Ol’ Lady.

As for the internet, yesterday afternoon we were debating going out for supper after Friday work and decided there was nothing we could afford or that we wouldn’t have to shower and change for that would be any better than a big plate of tossed salad with some of our first green beans steamed and a handful of our new blueberries, slices of our first tomatoes and the rest of the world’s best chicken salad, the recipe for which came from the internet.

I cooked about 2 pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs (I like dark meat — recipe calls for 2 whole chicken breasts) in a mixture of Move Over Butter and EVOO. Cool and shred or dice. Wash and dice 3 stalks of good celery.

Then, and this is the crowning glory of this dish, you make an aioli by whizzing in the food processor 1 cup mayonnaise (I used Duke’s reduced-fat), 2 peeled garlic cloves, 2/3 cup best-quality grated Parmesan (do NOT buy pre-grated for this dish) and 1 cup basil leaves, washed and patted dry. You’re sorta making chicken salad with pesto and mayonnaise but the freshness of the basil and the tang of your good Parmesan make it something better than that.

Combine aioli with chicken and celery, diced and try to keep from eating it all at one sitting.

Category:

good food, Seasonal food, Summer salads, Weight loss

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In praise of Laurie Colwin

Many food writers claim Elizabeth David, M.F.K. Fisher or Julia Child as their first inspirations. For me it was Laurie Colwin’s “Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen” (Vintage Contemporaries paperback, reprinted 2010). Originally published in 1988, Colwin’s was the first food writing to speak to me in a distinct voice. Chatty, funny, sensual, she wrote rambling, personal chapters about different landmark foods in her life — sometimes she didn’t even include a “real” recipe.
But for 22 years I’ve made her potato salad (also her oven-baked ribs) and served it to general acclaim. It tastes bright and fresh and is a textbook lesson in why you should grow your own potatoes or buy little babies from a local grower. Potatoes dug when field corn turns from the color of a John Deere tractor to a darker shade of green have a melted butter texture and tender skins.
Boil as many of these as you think you’ll need for a meal and leftovers. (With a sliced hard-boiled egg, this makes a wonderful summer breakfast.)  If you’re boiling freshly dug and scrubbed potatoes (I don’t peel them but do wash and cut  them into bite-size chunks), they won’t need more than 10 to 15 minutes. Stick a fork in to tell by feel. You don’t want them to disintegrate in potato salad — that’s a different dish, one called smashed potatoes!
Drain cooked potatoes and in salad bowl mix together reduced-fat mayonnaise, the juice of half a large lemon, a handful of fresh (never dried!) minced dill, a couple of finely chopped green onions and five to six generous turns of freshly ground black pepper.  Eyeball the mixture to guesstimate if you have enough for your potatoes, and gently toss the potatoes in the dressing.
Take a taste. The lemon juice needs at least a couple of hours to “mellow” so don’t be alarmed if there’s a sharp taste of citrus. If you can’t taste lemon, you probably want to juice the other half. Other than that, do you need anything else? A LITTLE salt perhaps? Now’s the time to add because tender potato pieces are going to soak up all the flavors in the fridge while they chill.
That’s all there is to making the perfect potato salad. Since first eating this, I may have tried one or two other recipes (He Who Thinks Cookies Are a Food Group periodically requests “bacon, bacon, bacon”), but this is my gold standard. Sort of like the original Silver Palate’s brownie recipe with espresso powder and cinnamon added — nothing beats it.

Category:

good food, healthy cooking, Local food, Summer salads

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Sumer is icumen in

On Saturday morning He Who Wears Plaid Shirts took my favorite Chicago knife to the garden and came back with Chinese cabbage, regular cabbage, broccoli and the snowiest cauliflower heads I’ve ever seen. We’d already bought 2 gallons of strawberries and a pound of snow peas at Howard’s berry patch so after I tried another batch of pectin-free jam, we gobbled up a lunchtime stir-fry with the Chinese cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, peas, a bit of leftover asparagus from the garden, one of our red onions and lots of garlic.

Beginning with those vegetables requiring the longest cooking time — the cauliflower florets and carrot slices — I cooked them in a mix of sesame and canola oils, adding some powdered ginger (too lazy to look for the fresh ginger in the freezer), soy and oyster sauces and a little salt and pepper (nothing like the shovelsful of salt my Chinese cooking teacher always added!).   I rinsed and drained a can of shoepeg corn and threw that in as well to make a complete protein with the rice cooked in the steamer by Plaid Shirt Guy.

Monday morning food quarterbacking: I can’t decide if this or our Sunday night beet salad was my favorite food of the weekend.

Leaving about 2 inches of tops on each to prevent all the beautiful beet color from bleeding into the cooking liquid, I steamed them  in gently boiling water for 30 minutes.  On young cooked beets you can slip off the tops and skins with just your thumbs.

The salad — our Sunday supper with delicious no-knead oat bread made by P.S.G. and a fruit compote of local berries together with one very ripe mango (not local, alas) — could not have been simpler or better.

Slice beets on a bed of romaine, top each salad with 1/4 cup toasted walnuts and 1/4 cup blue cheese plus 1-2 tablespoons Ken’s Steakhouse light balsamic vinaigrette.

92 and muggy today, 96 tomorrow. While I despise the Carolina Piedmont summer weather and have groused about it for 33 years, I love the eating. You open the fridge, look at all the garden-fresh fruits and vegetables inside and simply choose how you’ll embellish them today.

Category:

healthy cooking, Local food, Rural life, Summer salads

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