I could eat salad every day. Something about the combination of different textures and flavors, all dressed with a good, homemade dressing just grabs my palate.

But you can fall into a rut, and we do. It’s so easy to use tender green leaf lettuce and cut up an apple and crumble some blue cheese and throw on toasted almonds. Not that it isn’t good because it is, especially when there’s a tiny touch of Dijon mustard int he dressing, and maybe we pick up a fennel and slice a little of that in there, you know, if we’re feeling flush.

Sometimes I have to break out of the box and make myself go find another salad. Explore new green avenues. The spinach salad in the prevoius posting, for instance. And this little paradigm-shifting fried cheese salad.

We ate a lot of halloumi cheese in England. Vegetarians like it because you can grill and fry it, and there are a lot of vegetarians in England. The low milk fat, high protein profile causes haloumi to cook rather than melt. Fry it like a patty, serve it on a bun. Stuff it into portobellos. Top a salad with it. We were so sorry that we couldn’t  find it here. Big Fella was told that’s because one company controlled the distribution for this part of the country and they preferred to sell halloumi in industrial amounts rather than consumer-size packages.

Lately, we’ve been spotting it in a Middle Eastern market on Nolensville Road. Two very similar recipes on recipezaar.com pointed in the same general direction: a warm caper vinaigrette. The recipe is from Delia Smith, who is sort of the Julia Child of England. Or maybe more the Marian Cunningham. Solid, dependable, unflashy but innovative. I like that in a recipe as much as in a person.

Fried Halloumi with Caper Vinaigrette Over Salad

Zest and juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 tabelspoon balsamic vinegar
1 to 2 teaspoons capers
1 garlic cloves, minced
1 shallot, minced
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1 block halloumi (it’s usually around 8 to 10 ounces)
Flour seasoned with salt and pepper
Oil for frying (just a little)

Whisk or shake the dressing ingredients to blend. Pat the cheese dry and slice into 8 slices. Coat the slices with a little flour and fry in just little oil until golden. Layer over salad greens and dress with the vinaigrette. Makes 2 main dish or 4 side salads.

A friend gave us venison back strap — a generous gift, as you already know if you’re a hunter.I settled on a vinegar-soy-sesame oil marinade, then a wrap of bacon and a drizzle of blueberry pomegranate syrup and a turn under the flames.

Big Fella saw me deeply involved with the vegetable side dishes and asked what he could do. He doesn’t cook, per se,  except for the odd skillet-browned bratwurst and soysage scramble, because he doesn’t have to.

Also, he’s a perfectionist who finds the most difficult possible way to do everything. It always turns out a superior result, but it’s maddeningly slow. Example: when it’s his turn to top the pizza, he chops each topping into microscopically small bits, thenspreads them with precision over the pizza. It takes ages.

But honestly, dinner needed attention. “You could wrap the venison pieces in bacon,” I offered. “But here’s the thing: the bacon will melt, and the fat will spread over the meat naturally, so don’t spend a lot of time trying to cover every millimeter of the meat with bacon.” Because wthout directions, he’d spend 30 minutes and  use a whole pound of the better-than-usual bacon we bought.

When I cook Chinese, I use a mise en place system because you’d be crazy not to, and end up with cruddy results.

For other cuisines, my aprons and dishtowels tell the story. I stop often to wipe my hands clean so I can prep the next step, because I didn’t set it out before I started.

When I checked in on Big Fella’s progress, I just had to shoot a photo. This perfect mise was the handiwork of my husband, whose car is a rolling trash can and whose office has corners piled so high with crap that we’ll have to hire a professional. I can’t explain it, so I had to document it.

Every summer, the same thing happens in the cookbook business: the workload ramps up to critical at just the moment we’re supposed to leave town for a week. So to the hard-working members of the cookbook committee of Service League of Urbanopolis: I’m going because it’s time to go. I leave your book in less cranky better hands. I’ll be back in a few days.

And I leave visitors to this blog with a few thoughts:

I’m selling my Harold’s gift card on eBay. I’ve been shopping there five times since December, and it occurs to me that I don’t know these size 16 people who wear wild prints and inappropriately cut clothes. What are they like?

 

Have you noticed the return of tautology? At first, it was just a co-worker saying, “It is what it is.” Which is pretty well indisputable, and that’s good, since you don’t want to argue with colleagues. But then rap singers started telling us that we’re not hot because we’re not hot, and Olympics contenders are telling the interviewer that they’re nervous to meet Mary Lou Retton, “because, you know, she’s Mary Lou Retton.”

I’m not saying I understand the trend, except maybe English is developing subtle layers of meaning. Or maybe it just is what is it is.

Does your midlife crisis not feel like the stuff sitcoms are made of? Yeah, mine neither.

I leave you with two cool photos because it’s hot. I’m gone because I’m out of here.

First, a picture of ice cream. Not since the torrone and riso ice creams of Italy have I eaten an ice cream this good. It’s creamy without being greasy. There’s just enough air whipped into it to give it a light, as opposed to icy, texture but not the puffy, gelatin texture that cheap ice creams have. The blackberry flavor is intensely blackberry flavored.

And the other is cucumber limeade. You can decide whether it needs a shot of vodka. Mine did.

Ginger Cucumber Limeade

1 large cucumber, peeled

3 limes (or 1/3 cup frozen limeade concentrate)

1/2 cup sugar syrup

1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger

1 cup club soda or sparkling water, chilled

ice

Juice the cucumber, limes and ginger in a centrifugal juicer. (Or blend them in a blender — but squeeze the limes first.) Add the sugar syrup to taste. Combine the mixture with the club soda in a pitcher. Serve with a slice of cucumber, and a shot of vodka if you need it. Makes 3 servings.

Big Fella’s fond childhood food memories include Shake ‘N Bake chicken, and for the 19 years of our marriage, he’s not failed to bring it up at least every month.

I suppose I was meant to take the hint and buy it but it’s a fact that my fond childhood food memories do not include Shake ‘N Bake. We rednecks didn’t venture much beyond flour, salt, pepper and Crisco, because why would you want to bake a chicken when you could fry it?

So he finally bought it himself, like he finally started putting his Big Bucket into the dishwasher himself, again after waiting 19 years for me to do it.

It shakes up nice, and bakes up golden, I’ll give it that.

But the taste is so vile, and even the tiny nubbin I tried left my mouth tasting of plastic and chemicals. I had to drink a gin and tonic with extra lime to clear the taste. Big Fella got a Proustian rush from every morsel. I think it explains a lot, really.

Perhaps I oversold this easy-to-handle pastry in a previous post on Greek greens pie since both of my readers requested the recipe. It has some wonderful qualities: rolls with less arm-power, rolls much thinner, pulls off the marble pastry slab in one piece, doesn’t stick to itself, doesn’t perceptibly toughen when re-rolled and doesn’t harden in the fridge. It was developed to make a twisted, spiral shaped greens “tart,” in which greens are rolled, jellyroll style, into a long snake of pastry, then the snake is twisted and coiled. Very bendy.

All this comes at a price: rather than tender flakiness, it has a certain rustic authenticity. Come to think of it, that might be because I use whole wheat pastry flour, so maybe it’s more tender than I realize. Use it for vegetable tart-like creations such as quiches and the like and not for dessert pies and tarts.

Olive Oil Pastry

The recipe comes from Recipezaar. I use whole wheat pastry flour.

• 2 cups pastry flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 cup water

• 2/3 cup olive oil

Combine the pastry flour, salt and baking powder in food processor. Add the water and oil process until pastry-like. Remove and shape into a ball. Let it rest for 10 minute before rolling. Makes enough to line a 10-inch springform pan with enough left to fold over the filling.

As long as the potlucks and picnics of May continue, the greatest hits of Junior League cookbooks past and present will roll out of my kitchen on colorful disposable plates. It’s the kind of food you’re somehow supposed to feel guilty about, because it’s full of short cuts and prepared or ready-to-use products. As if those were bad.

Vegetable Squares are defensible junk food masquerading as a side dish or appetizer. Almost everyone will eat them.

Puppy Chow (Dawg Food if you attended the University of Georgia) is light, sweet and crisp, and so good you’ll have to force yourself to move away from the bowl. And it can be thrown together in about 20 minutes.

The season goes on — what are you bringing?

Vegetable Squares

I use homemade Dijon garlic vinaigrette in place of the ranch dressing mix, and use just 1/3 to 1/2 cup of mayonnaise.

2 (8-count) packages refrigerated crescent rolls

2 (8-ounce) packages cream cheese, softened

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1 envelope ranch salad dressing mix

1 bunch broccoli, cut into tiny florets, lightly steamed if you like

2 colored bell peppers, minced

1 zucchini, shredded

4 carrots, shredded

Chopped fresh chives or parsley, if desired

• Press the crescent rolls into a 9 x 12-inch baking pan, pressing the dough to seal the seams. Press it slightly up the sides of the pan to form a lip. Bake at 375 as directed on the package. Let cool.
• Mix the cream cheese, mayonniase and salad dressing mix until smooth. Spread it over the cooled crust. Layer the vegetables over the cream cheese mixture.
• Sprinkle with chives or parsley, if you dare, or if the children are older. Cut into about 32 bars. Makes 12 kid-size “side dish” servings or about 16 adult appetizer servings.

Puppy Chow

Pretzels make a good substitute for about half of the Chex. When we run out of Chex, we’ve substituted Golden Grahams and Cap’n Crunch.

1 stick (8 tablespoons) butter

1/3 cup peanut butter

2 cups semisweet chocolate chips or chopped white almond bark

9 cups Crispix or Corn Chex

4 cups (1 pound) confectioners’ sugar

• Melt the butter, peanut butter and chocolate in a saucepan, mixing well. Measure the cereal into a large bowl or soup pot. Pour the chocolate mixture over it and stir gently but quickly to coat.
• Pour the confectioners’ sugar into a large paper grocery sack (or a plastic sack without holes). Add the chocolate-covered cereal and toss to coat with confectioners’ sugar.
• Serve right away or store in ziptop plastic bags.
• Bake sale time: This recipe makes enough to fill 15 snack-size plastic bags.

We were going to be really, really late to a potluck last week, and I knew it beforehand. I wanted to take something that everyone would love, so they would be happy to see us, instead of annoyed that we were late. So I made deviled eggs.
It was my first batch of deviled eggs ever. That’s because I sincerely dislike them. I’m not even a little waffley about the matter. Eggs are kind of ~eh~ for me anyway, and deviled eggs embody all the things that make me pull a face. The smell, the rubbery whites, the … Sorry.

    But a distant relative of mine — my step-half-sister-in-law’s mother — who is a wonderful Southern cook, once told me that you simply cannot prepare a large enough batch of deviled eggs to meet the demand. “They’ll eat every last one you make, no matter how many,” she said.

I’ve always wondered what the devilish part of deviled eggs is. If cleanliness is next to godliness, what is next to devilishness? Is it the mustard? That hardly seems worthy of the name “devil.” Here’s a Southern transplant who uses Tabasco — that seems more satanic, anyway, than mustard.

    A cookbook I’ve been working on lately (Junior League of Greater Ft. Lauderdale) included an interesting deviled egg recipe that looked like it might conjure a little underworld-y heat. Instead of the usual suspects, the filling included horseradish. I added a spoonful of a hot Russian mustard. Those Russians, they know from hot mustard. Then I decorated the little cholesterol boats with olives, a twinkling of dill and little chive appendages. I figured the olives would warn away little kids. The chives and dill were just for personality: some looked a little like lawns, or smiley faces, or Mr Potato Head. You want people to know they’re getting something a little out of the ordinary, right?

I didn’t taste one — you can put lipstick on a pig and all that. We arrived well into the dinner hour, and everyone had fixed a plate. I was a little worried I’d have to take the devils back home. But my stephalfsisterinlaw’smother was right — 20 minutes later there was nothing left on the dish.

On a rainy late winter day, I came in from a long day away and my Precious Muffin surprised me with these extraordinary flower cookies.  She picked the recipe from American Girl magazine and she and Big Fella shopped for the ingredients. It was no short-cut slice-and-bake or box mix cookie, either, but a real toffee cookie with a chocolate chunk center. She didn’t shortcut the decorations, either. It must have taken hours. They were beautiful and really good, too. I guess she is interested in the culinary arts, after all. As with everything else, chocolate and marshmallows were key.

Big Fella went to an all-boy Superbowl party and shot this photo. I asked, “Were there naked women there too?” Because, you know, it seems like that’s the  only element missing from an otherwise perfect evening.

When Big Fella and I were young marrieds, we ate bean soup for dinner at least four times a month because it was cheap. Which is why it took me so long to realize I don’t like it. It invariably disappoints. Either it’s watery, or strongly beany tasting, or bland. Or if the mixture includes a lot of meat for flavor, the soup is greasy or salty. I quit making it and quit ordering it in restaurants.

But food writer John Thorne opened my eyes. Thorne, food fetishist and author of the serious food newsletter Simple Cooking, spends all his time thinking deep thoughts about food.

He didn’t like bean soup either, but he untangled the threads of his dislike and discovered he’d been using the wrong approach. The object of soup, he observed, is not to flavor water.

I must have read Stone Soup too often, because my soups always started with a pot of water, plus onions, meat and seasonings, and always turned out bland.

Thorne’s is different. The object is to cook down the beans until they’re velvety soft, then to saute a whole lot of vegetables until they’re sweet, mellow and slightly caramelized.  When you have a flavorful foundation built, then you add the liquid.

It’s the best bean soup recipe I’ve found. I like everything about it, including the fact that it can mostly be done in a Crock Pot.

No-name butter bean soup
I’ve also tried dry pinto beans and they work just as well. Bring 1 cup of dried limas or butter beans to a boil in a generous amount of water. Let stand 1 hour, drain, and cover with 3 cups fresh cold water. Cook until meltingly tender. (Which is possible in only 12 minutes if you use a pressure cooker.) (I’m just sayin.)

Meanwhile, chop 4 ounces ham, 4 big carrots and an onion. Cut the carrots fairly thin. Saute over low heat until onion is browned at the edges, then continue sauteeing until the color of the carrots deepens and the onions are somewhat caramelized.

Add a minced garlic clove, a little black pepper, salt and red pepper to taste and a pinch of thyme. Cook 2 or 3 more minutes or until garlic is translucent. Stir in the reserved butter beans and their cooking liquid and heat to simmering. Add 2 cups of milk and heat to steaming. Turn heat as low as possible and simmer 15 minutes before serving.