I photographed this salad meal the other day, but the photos were unsuccessful. It was no bother at all to re-make the meal and shoot it again, because I have happily eaten this four times this week.
It was inspired by my to-this-date favorite food writer, M.F.K. Fisher. I am leaving the top spot vulnerable to someone new, just in case, but for now she’s still up there. I’ve been rereading her books lately, and her descriptions of foods that one could easily get and eat during WWII included this great salad. I take exception, however, to her green beans as remembered from Venice. “as long as your thumb and barely thicker than a hair…” I grow my own green beans, have grown several kinds over the years, and the barely thicker than a hair just doesn’t happen in my experience. In seeking the effect I have picked green beans so small they fell through the holes in my colander, but they were already a good bit thicker than a hair and besides they didn’t taste like green beans. Fisher must be forgiven, because usually when she waxes lyrical you know exactly what she means and you would have said it the same way if it had occurred to you.
I was going to publish a scan of her photograph on the cover of my book. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, with perfect bones, a mouth drawn on by a master and a steady gaze to engage you. She had her own style and for good or ill she kept it until she died. I planned to dazzle you with this image of her in her thirties, but Mr. Henry beat me to it! I call that really strange, that two different people on different continents should have the impulse to publish the exact same thing about a woman now gone for years.
My salad is made up largely of what is growing on this farm at this moment. It has different things at different meals. This one doesn’t have any of my delicious cucumbers nor any beets, which I have to buy already cooked and shrink-wrapped from France. This one has no onion for the first time. I’ve been finding tiny cauliflowers lately, so they generally have that, and even though our new potatoes are not small and cannot be left whole, I like to include them every time.
Today’s salad has some ceci/garbanzos I cooked. It has a tiny zucchine left whole, and some of my green beans. I have to buy the radishes as it is far too hot here for them to form roots, but I do insist on them.
What is really great about this salad, for me, is that I can prepare and cook the vegetables early in the morning or late at night when it is cool, then drain and keep them in the refrigerator to be eaten when the sun is pouring 100 plus degrees on my head. I just take them out to come to room temperature, make a vinaigrette and assemble that which I feel like eating. I have been enjoying a very chilled glass of a rosé wine from Puglia with it.
Summer food can be also very lavish and memorable. I remember lobsters on the coast of my home state, Maine. My only taste of foie gras was in summer near Lyon. Moules frites are pretty much a summer thing, at least in my life. Beach food and street food smells and tastes are summer memories. I think, though, when you come right down to it, a plate full of the freshest and best summer vegetables is hard to beat. There is not another time in the year when this tastes just like it tastes now. Eat it.
August 9th, 2008
I’ve been reading lists all over the internet food world based on the best recipes of 2007, either their own trials or recipes they’ve picked up from this site or that one. I have never done a list like that for Think On It, so I thought I would instead farm the entire life of this blog and list what has been mentioned most often or eaten most often here casa mia.
Think On It, as a food blog, is in main dedicated to food prepared according to the basic tenets of Italian cookery, but simple enough for anyone to make. I mean anyone, and that includes you as well as the cook who has been turning out great meals for twenty years. I avoid piling up flavors and sauces, because that’s not Italian!
Toasted leeks and pecorino pasta is still Art’s favorite pasta. I am really proud of that, that living in Italy where pasta is tossed about like M&Ms Art still likes one of my original recipes the best! What would one do for reassurance without one’s friends?
The best carrots I know are still the best to me. I made this dish for a shared Christmas dinner this year and they disappeared like snow in Miami. I left out the thyme, too, because the real secret is the cumin, or comino. For a former carrot-avoider, this recipe has turned out to really have legs. Try them. (For some reason this link won’t work. Go to: http://www.judithgreenwood.com/thinkonit/the-best-carrots-i-know/
My vote for best one dish meal from the pages of Think On It, is Insalatona fra diavolo. I always freeze some pitted black cherries so that I can have this salad when cherries aren’t in season (and because you can’t buy bags of frozen plain cherries in my city.) When they are used up I have to wait until cherries come back in May and it makes me sad. The recipe actually makes two meals I love at once, and there can’t be anything wrong with that idea!
Antipasto is well represented here, but on another international food site Tiny Baked Potatoes has been the hands down winner, voted among the top one hundred appetizer recipes worldwide. I can only take credit for figuring out how you can make this Pugliese dish at home, if you, like I, can’t rush off to Puglia today. How I would love to.
My most often cooked non pasta first course, or primo, is surely Toasted Leek and Potato Soufflé, a dish I find beautiful and absolutely delicious. I know it looks difficult, but it isn’t at all, and you don’t have to use a soufflé dish to cook it, although if you have one, why not?
The vote for best vegetarian dish is split. The first one has to be Pasta e Fagioli which is a feel-good dish without equal. I can make a little for just me, or a lot for a crowd and it always is good. When the weather is awful, this makes up for it. Just leave out the ham and you can feed it to a Bhuddist.
The second one is la Bomba although it is not Italian other than that I developed it here in my Italian kitchen using ingredients I bought in Italy. My evenings in Paris are about food. Sad, isn’t it? Just leave out the ham, and you’ll never miss it. I love, love, love this way with lentils. Ahh, Paris, how you inspire me.
Best cucina alta, the Italian version of haute cuisine, dish is the veal stuffed with veal on that page. I’ve come up with one small improvement lately, which is the inclusion of finely minced prosciutto crudo, or parma ham in the stuffing. This is a dish that goes on giving, because if you don’t slurp the cooking broth down immediately, you can have it another day with some tiny stuffed pasta, like capelletti or tortellini, or you can freeze it and cook another meat in it another day. I consider that practical as all get out.
Okay, that’s nine choices, and everybody does ten. The tenth is waiting for you. Please comment and tell me about something you’ve cooked from here and how it came out for you. If it wasn’t a success, tell me, because I’m determined to make every recipe just right.
If you click on something and there’s no photo, it may be that it’s a Flickr feed that isn’t working. Flickr has become irregular in what they show and I can’t count on them any more. That’s a shame, ma è la vita, sì?
December 31st, 2007
The genuine Greek salad, as I found it when eating in Mykonos in 1984.
This summer there’s one difference. Instead of chunks of plain fresh tomatoes, the tomatoes are made up into Ligurian tomato salad. The tomatoes are chunked, sprinkled with salt, a finely minced clove of garlic goes in, and then it is doused with good olive oil. When eating it on its own, I add a generous amount of finely sliced fresh basil, but for Greek salad I do not. The bowl of tomatoes is covered with a clean dishtowel and left to marinate for at least 30 minutes.
To assemble this Greek salad, which I love to have composed rather than tossed, I peel and chunk a cucumber for the first layer. Over that goes a similar amount of the tomato salad, then a layer of finely sliced onion, a layer of crumbled Feta, and last a handful of dry-cured black olives. This has made me happy five times this week! One other time I sliced everything very thin instead and layered it onto a dry-grilled piadina– a dead ringer for a flour tortilla. A bit of oil and then roll ‘her up. Cut in two and tackle with your hands.
It makes me feel like a Greek island goddess.
August 18th, 2007
