Sept. 4: Kale makes me happy, but you already knew that!

Another kale salad? Why the heck not! My love of kale has been well-documented this summer, and adding yet another salad to the mix just seemed to make sense. Though, truthfully, this post ends up being more about the dressing than the salad... 

Originally the plan was for the kale caesar salad (see the video below). Then I realized I'm not really a fan of anchovies, and wasn't in the mood to buy them just for this salad. Capers aren't something I love love, either. So I took the idea, and the general concept from the recipe that PBS posted (one of their most clicked on recipes in the month of August!) and adapted to suit my tastes.



Pretty funny pup, eating kale, eh? I love this video. It's a very happy salad-making moment. (I put the happy in there just for you, Jen.)

I also had a really great kale salad at a juice/salad place in Seattle earlier this summer, and have been meaning to recreate that combination of flavors all summer. So this salad really turned into an amalgam of 1) what is around and fresh, 2) my taste memories and 3) any excuse to throw a handful of parmesan cheese into a bowl and call it healthful!

Kale salad with corn, avocado and tomato
Serves 2, as a side dish, 1 if you're me
3 large handfuls of prepped kale--destemmed, roughly chopped or ripped
1 large tomato, diced
1/2 avocado, cubed
1 ear corn, roasted and cut off the cob
1 cup croutons, homemade preferable but storebought is allowed ;)
1/3 cup shredded parmesan
Salt and pepper to taste

Dressing
2 shallots, peeled and roughly chopped
3 garlic cloves, peeled
1 large bunch parsley, washed
1 egg yolk
2 tsp. dijon mustard
2 Tbsp. sherry vinegar
2/3 cup olive oil

Put all the dressing ingredients into a blender and whiz on high until blended well.

Put the kale in a large mixing bowl and drizzle the dressing generously over the leaves. Massage the kale with your hands until the leaves wilt and the dressing is very well integrated.

Add the rest of the salad ingredients except the parmesan, and toss to combine. Add a bit more dressing to the salad to ensure that the additional ingredients get coated well with dressing. Add the parmesan last and toss one more time, then season to taste with salt and pepper.

This recipe makes more dressing than needed for one salad. Put the rest of the dressing in a jar and refrigerate. Its pretty greenness will call to you from the fridge!

This salad and dressing are both keepers. I love the bite of the shallots and garlic, as well as the green goddess appearance from the parsley. I will be tossing this dressing on many a salad in the near future!

Enjoy. These waning days of summer, all I want is the good, fresh produce that I know is going to vanish before we know it. Poof.

Jen and I (and now my mom and Lisa too!) are blog challenging throughout September. You can catch her blog over at Stuff Jen Says. If you want to write along with us, give me a shout and I'll send you the blog prompts.

Baked ricotta salad with pesto

ummer eating just keeps on rolling... the tomatoes are finally ON, daily, and the corn is minutes away from being truly harvestable (which didn't stop me from harvesting some today anyway!). The basil keeps churning out new and even bigger leaves, and I can't help but whiz up pesto with alarming frequency. Well, I'm not alarmed, but I'm pretty sure you would be if you saw the big dallops I put on just about everything but my granola. Ah well, tis the season, right?

Here's my current favorite salad, combining all these flavors and another new yum discovery: baked ricotta.

First with the ricotta:

Baked ricotta
1 small container part-skim ricotta
2 eggs
1/2 cup shredded parmesan
1/4 cup flour

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Either with a hand-held or stand mixed, beat ricotta very well, until fluffy. Add the eggs and cheese, beat again. Add the flour and mix well, until incorporate.

Spread the cheese mixture into a non-stick-sprayed 8x8 baking pan, and put into the hot oven. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the cheese sets up and is golden.

Remove from the oven and cool to room temperature.

Baked ricotta salad
Serves 6 as side dish
One recipe baked ricotta (see above), cubed to 1/2 inch squares
4 medium tomatoes, cubed
1 cup fresh pesto
2 cups fresh corn, cooked, cut off the cob (about 4 ears) (totally optional, I made it one day with, one day without... both were lovely)
Salt and pepper to taste

Toss all ingredients together in a medium mixing bowl. That's it. Enjoy!

Tips: If you prebake the ricotta and it's refrigerator cold, take it out in advance and bring it back to room temperature before making the salad. You can also microwave it briefly to bring some warmth back to the cheese. The flavor is much better when not ice cold.

Polenta panzanella

y love of panzanella and it's many variations has been documented a few times on the blog... here, here and here, at least. Any kind of chopped salad with fresh seasonal ingredients gets me pretty excited...

When I had a few girlfriends over for lunch recently, I concocted a variation I hadn't seen around before, but it seemed like it should exist: panzanella with polenta cubes standing in for the stale bread. I did a google search (my first line of research, naturally) and found it listed on a few restaurant menus, but no recipes themselves appeared in a cursory search. But, I figured it couldn't be too hard to figure out... I had the polenta left over from a weekend breakfast and was bound and determined to find a use for it!

Polenta panzanella
Serves 4 as a side dish
2 cups cooked and cooled polenta that's been spread to about a 1/2 inch thickness, then cubed
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1/4 cup shredded parmesan cheese
1.5 cups chopped tomatoes
1 cup kalamata olives, pitted
1 can (16 oz) artichoke hearts in water, drained
1 red bell pepper, cored and cut into 1/2 inch pieces
1 cup cucumber, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
1 cup fresh basil leaves, chopped roughly
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar

Toss the polenta in bread crumbs and parmesan to coat, and then fry lightly and quickly in a hot saute pan so they brown and crisp up.

Drain the polenta cubes on a platter lined with paper towels to soak up any excess grease, and set aside.

Combine the next six ingredients in a mixing bowl until well combined, and then drizzle olive oil and balsamic vinegar lightly over the mixture. Stir again. Let sit for a half hour at room temperature to allow flavors to mingle.

Arrange polenta cubes on a serving platter and top with the tomato mixture and parmesan-bread crumb crumbles, if you're lucky enough to have a few of those fall off the polenta.

Serve immediately.

The frying step was the most challenging for me, but the fried crumbles of bread crumbs and parmesan that were left behind in the saute pan were one of the highlights of the dish. Truly yummy. I sprinkled them over the dish as I tossed the other, non-polenta, ingredients. Another google search found others with similar issues/concerns... I think next time I will have the pan hotter, and maybe coat the polenta in an egg wash before tossing in the bread crumbs and parmesan...

In all, this was a lovely surprise of a dish. I can imagine having it as a warm dish in the winter as well, making a kind of ratatouille stew over the top of the polenta cubes...

I love steak + I love salad = many Perfect Bites of steak salad

teak salad has been a favorite of mine for a long time...really, from the first bite I had of one such salad, years ago. A couple of local restaurants have usually served good summer steak salads... until one of them stopped serving lunch and the other had a major chef-changeover, thus new menu, thus no more steak salad...

But that's OK, I can make one for myself! Having a variety of summer ingredients on hand, and steak as well, makes for a happy girl in this kitchen.

It's been a few years since I first saw tomatoes and nectarines and/or peaches together in a salad--not what I immediately said "oh yes" to, but it proved itself a surprising sweet-savory combination. Add to that a little grilled steak, some avocado and blue cheese, and this salad has all the makings of a Perfect Bite. (I am a big fan of meals that can bring about a Perfect Bite, as you can read here, here or here, if you have spare time on your hands...)

Steak salad with tomatoes and nectarines
1 4-6 oz. steak, grilled to your preference, cooled and sliced thinly
1 tomato, cut into eighth wedges
1 nectarine, sliced
1/2 avocado, peeled and cubed
2 cups mixed greens of your choice, washed and chopped
1/3 cup blue cheese crumbles
Balsamic vinaigrette

Arrange the salad greens on a dinner-size plate, and add the steak, tomatoes, nectarines and avocado in whatever order you'd like. Crumble the blue cheese over the top and drizzle with vinaigrette.

This one makes my day, whenever I get a chance to whip it up. I hope you enjoy as well.

Soup for a warm day: Creamy gazpacho andaluz

o, with a post title like that, what we'll need, then, is a warm day, right?! That seems to be the plea throughout the Pacific Northwest right now: Where's summer?

When picnic planning for last weekend, I assumed warmth would be a factor--in the weather. Well, you know what happens when you assume, right? Sigh. We ended up eating it in a picnic shelter alongside the river, while raindrops fell and our (well, my) feet were wrapped in a blanket. Warmth, ha!

But this soup was warm in another way. I made a slight pepper adjustment (jalapeno instead of serrano), and it warmed us, all the way down! Actually quite lovely for my sinuses, but next time I'll stick with the pepper they suggest...

Creamy gazpacho andaluz
3 lbs. ripe tomatoes, cored
1 small cucumber, peeled, halved and seeded
1 medium green bell pepper, halved cored and seeded
1 small red onion, peeled and halved (I had and used shallots)
2 medium garlic cloves, peeled and quartered
1 small serrano chile, stemmed and halved
Kosher salt
1 slice white sandwich bread, torn in one-inch pieces
1/2 cup EVOO (here I deviated from the recipe and used a 1/4 cup olive oil and made up the rest with V8 juice)
2 Tbsp. sherry vinegar
2 Tbsp. finely minced parsley, chives or basil leaves

Roughly chop 2 lbs. of tomatoes, half of cucumber, half of bell pepper, and half of onion and place in bowl. Add garlic, chile and 1 1/2 tsp salt; toss until well combined; set aside.

Cut remaining tomatoes, cucmber, and pepper into 1/4" dice; place in medium bowl. Mince remaining onion and add to diced vegetables. Toss with 1/2 tsp salt and transfer to fine mesh strainer set over medium bowl. Set aside 1 hour.

Transfer drained diced vegetables to medium bowl and set aside. Add bread pieces to exuded liquid and soak 1 minute. Add soaked bread and any remaining liquid with roughly chopped vegetables and toss thoroughly to combine.

Transfer half of vegetable bread mixture to blender and process 30 seconds. With blender running, slowly drizzle in 1/4 cup oil and continue to blend until completely smooth, about 2 minutes. Strain soup through fine mesh strainer into large bowl, repeat with remaining bread mixture and 1/4 cup oil.

Stir in vinegar, minced herb, and half of diced vegetables into soup and season to taste. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

My variations include what I stated above in the ingredients list, and also: I didn't keep any fine dice of vegetables aside to add later. I like my soup all one consistency or another--smooth or chunky, not half of one, half of another. I also didn't push it through a fine mesh seive. I kept adding V8 juice until I got the consistency I wanted in the blender (a VitaMixer, so I was able to get it very smooth), and called it good.

While the flavor of the soup was lovely, it will be SO much better once using our garden tomatoes. Can't wait! Also, can't wait for the sunshine again.

I think the sweet dear we saw along the side of the road on the way to our picnic agrees, though she looked lovely in all the lush green.

Ready to eat like it's spring: Panzanella

pring has sprung, it really has. The grass is green--I think it's the greenest it's EVER been, and when I mow, the bags fill up in, like, a minute. Like, really. (Say it in your best Valley Girl voice, you know you want to.)

And in keeping with spring-ish-ness everywhere, I am finally getting out of the soups/stews/pasta doldrums and back into salads and freshness and Asparagus. Asparagus with a capital A! It's local, it's cheap and it's yummy. I could eat it three meals a day.

And in the salad realm, I could probably eat panzanella for two of those three meals. It's a salad that has a few core basics (um, bread?!) and the variations are endless. Here are a few iterations that appeal to me:

Ina Garten's Grilled Panzanella: A pretty traditional take on the original with basil, tomatoes and cucumbers.

Strawberry Panzanella: This would probably be either a dessert or breakfast option, but looks really yummy!

Salmon Panzanella: This would be popular around here, for sure. A twist on the original (peppers, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, capers) with cooked, cubed salmon.

Cous Cous a la Panzanella: Replace the bread with couscous, not a bad idea.

Spring Panzanella: Now you're talking my language... peas, asparagus and spinach. Sounds amazing.

Mushroom Panzanella: A nice twist, the mushrooms. Maybe once I get out morel hunting...

So with all those ideas overflowing in my brain, here's where I ended up recently... this salad has a lot to do with what's currently in the fridge!

Spring Panzanella
(Feeds 2, generously...)
2 cups tomatoes, cut into large chunks
2 cups day old (somewhat dry and hard) crusty bread (Italian or French loaf), cut into chunks the same size as the tomatoes
2 cups asparagus, roasted and cut into 1/2 inch pieces
2 cups greens, washed and dried
1 cup baby potatoes, roasted and cut into 1/2 inch cubes (I had mini-babies, so I left them whole)
1/2 red onion, chopped
1/3 cup kalamata olives, pitted and halved
1/4 cup good olive oil
2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup parmesan cheese shreds
Salt and pepper to taste

Toss all ingredients together in a large bowl and let sit for a half-hour, at least. (I usually have a hard time leaving it alone, and generally eat it immediately! What a rebel.)

One critical thing is to have the bread be old/dry, and not fresh. Fresh bread will suck up all of the olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and get mushy. If you don't have day-old bread, put your cut up cubes in a 300-degree oven for 5-10 minutes until the edges get dried out

Other things I like to add, if they're around (and no, for clarification, not all together):
*Cucumber (would have added it to the above salad if I'd had any in the house)
*Hard boiled eggs and raw mushrooms and blue cheese (kind of like a Cobb salad)
*Peppers: roasted or otherwise
*Artichoke hearts
*Pinenuts
*Hazelnuts
*Basil, arugula or spinach
*Fruit, such as nectarines or pears (a local restaurant had a summer version with melons and peaches and tomatoes and it was heavenly... they are no longer serving lunch. Guess I'll have to make that one myself...)

As I was looking through this blog to see if I'd posted on panzanella previously, I couldn't help but be drawn in by two previous blog posts that mention the salad: one on basil, and one on summer salads. It's official: I'm ready for summer.