We never say no to a salad, and we’re pretty much in love with every type of leafy green. Yet before you can feature your greens in a big leafy bowl, you’ve got to wash and dry those greens. We’ve perfected the technique and wanted to share the whole process with you here–the plunge into ice cold water that both cleanses and crisps, the powerful round of drying, and the important final step–eating. Here’s how it’s done!
Let’s talk about why sweet and savory are so good together.
In this dish, sweet peach, spicy arugula, and fragrant tarragon conspire to turn crispy trout into an extraordinary dinner. And while spicy arugula and fragrant tarragon (and fingerling potatoes! and almonds!) are good on their own, it’s the peaches here that set the dish apart.
To make a dish more tasty than usual, it helps to have its flavors hit several different notes. Two of those are sweet and savory.
We tend to think that sweet tastes below in dessert, after we’ve eaten our due savory courses. But if you think about some of the most delicious delicacies, you’ll find the two combined. Chocolate covered pretzels boast are better because they offer both sweet and savory notes. Many chefs pair melon or figs with salty prosciutto. Many Southeast Asian dishes, like these noodles, contain more sugar than you’d imagine, to balance out the sour, salty, and bitter notes that are instrumental to every dish.
So, back to the peach.
In summer, ripe peaches give off the scent of honey. Their juices are incredibly sweet, meant to drip off your chin when you take a bite. All those sugary notes provide just the complement to the other savory flavors in this dish: those rich almonds, that spicy arugula, that tangy dressing. By the time you’ve piled the salad high on top of the crispy trout, you’ll have made a meal that’s balanced, both in terms of health and flavor. Enjoy!
We’re happy to be participating in Food Network’s Summer Fest, a weekly blog tour of all the incredible produce we’ll be enjoying this summer. This week, the topic is peaches! You can see the other bloggers’ delicious creations by following the links below.
Cucumber varieties fall into one of three categories. First, there are slicing cucumbers. Next comes pickling cucumbers. And, finally, we’ve got burpless. And tell us – who would choose pickling or slicing when you’ve got a type called burpless? Burpless cucumbers have fewer seeds and a more mild taste than the other varieties. (You might have already tried burpless cucumbers in the form of an English cucumber in our chickpea-cucumber salad or our avocado-cucumber maki.)
These heirloom burpless cucumbers are one of four vegetables that really make this grain salad great. We make and eat a lot of grain salads in the summer, from farro & frisée salad to tabbouleh. With a grain as their base, these salads hit a perfect balance between being light and leaving you totally satisfied.
To make this barley number, we chose four gorgeous vegetables to start: wax beans, healthful yellow beets, a big red onion, and the infamous burpless cucumber. We took those ingredients, prepped and trimmed them, and then threw them into a big mixing bowl with barley–a nutrient-rich, quick-cooking grain that adds chewiness and heft to the salad.
After we dress the salad and arrange the pretty yellow beets on top, we add the final touch: shavings of pecorino cheese. Pecorino Romano adds nuttiness and an extra point of umami to the crunchy, crispy cucumbers and summery wax beans.
We’re happy to be participating in Food Network’s Summer Fest, a weekly blog tour of all the incredible produce we’ll be enjoying this summer. This week, the topic is cucumbers. You can see the other bloggers’ delicious cucumber creations by following the links below.
What do cereal, ribollita and panzanella have in common? All three were invented by the Italians as ways to use up any bread leftover from previous meals. Repurposing extra bread is not just about monetary thrift, though. We hold it as a worthy kitchen philosophy to use up every ingredient you own, letting as little go to waste as possible.
This mantra easily becomes reality when panzanella is on the table. If you like the croutons on salad, you’ll adore bread salad, or panzanella, which contains at least double the quantity of croutons in a normal salad. It’s like the croutons migrated from side dish to main course, from a movie extra to center stage.
In panzanella, the bread cubes, crisped up in the oven, get seasoned by their summery tomato salad partner: sweet tomato, rich olive oil, sharp garlic, and a good pinch of salt saturate the crumb. We pair this irresistible salad with crispy chicken, flavored with marjoram, an oregano-like herb that makes us feel like we’re in the Italian countryside, eating panzanella and enjoying summer.
We’re happy to be participating in Food Network’s Summer Fest, a weekly blog tour of all the incredible produce we’ll be enjoying this summer. This week, the topic is tomatoes. You can see the other bloggers’ delicious creations by following the links below.
Cooking traditional Southern corn fritters is one of the best ways to use two of the season’s sweetest vegetables: fresh peas and corn.
To gild the lily? We scored pea tendrils–the pretty green curlicues from the climbing vine of the pea plant. (Think of them like the branches of a tree, as opposed to the shoot, which is like a baby pea or a big sprout.) In this recipe, we toss the tendrils with a little bit of lemon and olive oil, and their sweetness complements the crunchy fritters.
Fritters are a perfect vessel for conveying the season’s vegetables to your mouth. The idea is to create a light batter to hold together all the season’s best vegetables. Lightly fried in a bit of oil, the fritters are an incredible, filling, and eminently presentable way to serve corn and peas in this recipe.
In this recipe, we use a batter of cornmeal, milk, flour, and chives to coat the fresh corn and fresh peas, allowing you to take advantage of these terrific ingredients in every bite. We couldn’t help but decide on a condiment, remoulade sauce, the famous creamy sauce of Louisiana Cajun and Creole cooking, as the perfect pairing for anything pan-fried, to top these sweet and savory pancake-like fritters.
You can get the full recipe over on our recipe card here.
We’re happy to be participating in Food Network’s Summer Fest, a weekly blog tour of all the incredible produce we’ll be enjoying this summer. This week, the topic is fresh peas. You can see the other bloggers’ delicious sweet pea creations by following the links below.
“Take some rounds of goat cheese. Press them into breadcrumbs. Fry the rounds in a little oil, or bake them at 400°F.”
Those instructions could have come from this week’s recipe card for Frisee and Farro Salad with Warm Goat Cheese, a tasty vegetarian main. But in fact the words are paraphrased from a 1983 New York Times article about the ascendance of goat cheese, written by Craig Claiborne, then the paper’s food critic. After this piece, warm goat cheese salad jumped from the tables of fancy French chefs and landed on stoves in American home kitchens, thanks to Claiborne and to Alice Waters, who put the dish on her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse.
When he wrote this article, Claiborne had just tasted Waters’ salad. He called goat cheese consumption a trend.
“One of the public’s present predilections is goat cheese,” he wrote, “better known in France as Chevre.”
Claiborne was right to publish the recipe for warm goat cheese, but he was wrong about one thing. Warm, breaded, melty goat cheese simply does not go out of style. This salad was not a trend. By the 90s, the salad seemed to be on every menu, often paired with nuts and fruit, and the dish persists in bistros and fine restaurants to this day.
We wanted to make sure the phenomenon made it to your kitchen, too, with a thoroughly modern twist. Favas, frisee, and farro distinguish our version.
In the original French concept, salad au chevre chaud, rounds of goat cheese are sliced and melted onto pieces of bread, which then rest on a bed of greens. But in the Alice Waters interpretation, the style that inspired our salad, breadcrumbs actually coat the cheese, lending crispness to every bite, in contrast to the creamy interior. It’s important to be sure that the breadcrumbs stick to the cheese, so we dip the rounds in flour, milk and panko.
For our salad, we’re sending customers goat cheese already sliced into rounds, but if you make the recipe on your own, try this unusual tip: use unwaxed dental floss to cut neat rounds of goat cheese from a log.
Another helpful practice, if you have a few extra minutes, is to freeze the breaded rounds for a few minutes before frying them. This helps to keep the breadcrumbs on the goat cheese as you cook.
See the recipe here and sign up to have all the ingredients in the salad delivered straight to you!
