Breaded beets on salad - transitioning to spring

Ingredients

2 medium beets, boiled and peeled
1 egg
flour
breadcrumbs
salt

for the salad:
whichever salad variety you like
olive oil
vinegar
salt & pepper


Spring is arriving with giant steps. Around two weeks ago, the singing birds came back from their winter retreat in the south, filling the air with beautiful song and waking us up in the morning with their music. Nature around us changes drastically with every day. Where yesterday there might have been a patch of dried up grass, today is it covered with flowers. First were of course the snow drops, then came the crocuses and now even the first violets and narcissus are blooming. Seared scrubs are coming back to life with hundreds of tiny blossoms, thirstily soaking up the first real rays of sunshine, like us.

With the changing seasons, now is the time to say goodbye to the root vegetables and cabbages of hearty winter, to gradually fade them out and move on to the lighter cuisine of spring and summer. This salad, which can also be eaten as an appetizer, eases into this transition, combining earthy beets with fresh greens.

Boil the beets like a potato and peel them when soft. Cut them in very thick stripes and pat them dry with a kitchen towel. Get the salad ready except for the dressing. While you can use whatever salad you have at hand, the occasion particularly lends itself to the first baby spinach of the year or if you are lucky enough to get your hands on dandelion greens, this is the place to use them.

Prepare three bowls, one with flower, one with the egg (scrambled and add a pinch of salt here) and one with breadcrumbs. Heat oil in a pan on medium to high heat. Cover each beet slice first with flour, then egg and finally breadcrumbs, and fry them on both sides for around 5 minutes total.

Now dress the salad with olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, and arrange on plates. On each plate, add two or three pieces of beets and enjoy saying goodbye to winter.

Life is good!

From Europe with Love - Pickled Beet Salad

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups beets (ca. 4 medium sized ones)
1 tsp juniper berries
3 bay leaves
1 tsp caraway seeds
1/3 cup water
1/4 cup white wine vinegar (more if you like)
1 tsp sugar
salt, pepper
1 large used glass jar with screw cap, thoroughly cleaned


Having splurged with crepes in red wine cream sauce, it is time for some healthy balance. What is more perfect for that, especially in winter, than beets? Just the quickest of Google searches for 'health benefits of beets" yields an impressive number, way above 20 million hits. Do I need to say more? But in real life, how often do you actually eat beets?

At home, my grandmother and mom, and basically most people I knew, would always have a jar of pickled beets in their pantry. Nothing was more simple than upgrading an otherwise boring bread and sausage dinner with something fresh and tasty. Yet maybe that's what kept me from giving them a try myself for so long - being intimidated by the mysterious and obscure process that transformed a beet into a pickled beet in a jar.

However, unless if you're aspiring to have your very own pantry shelf of jars lined up with military precision and ready to endure months or years of collecting dust, courage!, there is a relatively easy route to pickled beets.

Unfortunately, you still have to peel and boil or steam the beets (very similar to boiling potatoes actually), let them cool down and cut them into thin slices. If you can buy already peeled and steamed beets, they can also be used. In the meantime, heat the water, vinegar and spices in a small pot and after simmering the mix on low temperature, add in the sliced beets and bring to a boil.

To be able to store the beets for about a month, fill them in the jar while still as hot as possible including the vinegar-water mix, and immediately close the jar, letting it cool down turned upside down. Once it has cooled down and the jar is vacuum sealed, it should keep for at least a month in the fridge.



In order to tease out the full spectrum of health benefits as well as every dimension of the beets' earthen flavor, when ready to eat, topple them with a couple of drops of oil. My absolute favorite for this combination is the light fruitiness of grape seed oil, but while I wouldn't recommend a strongly flavored variety such as olive oil, most should work. While an absolute delight for the foodie, I bet it will be the taste of triumph to have succeeded in pickling your own beets that will make them truly irresistible.

Life is good!

Advice from the universe - cucumber salad with yogurt and dill

Ingredients
1 cucumber
2 tablespoons plain Greek yogurt
1 clove garlic, finely diced
¼ cup chopped dill
white wine vinegar
olive oil


Maybe this summer’s extraordinary heat wants to tell me something, maybe it’s a message from the universe along the lines of “dedicate your blog to finding new ways of quenching thirst and staying cool”, because that is what this operation has lately turned into: complaining about the heat, experimenting with foods that cater to the illusion of coldness and being grateful for the invention of central airconditioning.

On days of scorching heat when putting anything above room temperature in my mouth seemed like outright torture, I’ve found some relief in the cold florets of cauliflower salad, the icy sweetness of limoncello and the simplicity of a slice of buttered bread with radishes.

This cucumber salad is the latest addition to my collection of how to survive summer during a heat wave. It is an old classic and because of the creaminess of the yogurt, this salad can even be eaten as a light lunch with some bread - if at work, maybe it will be a good idea to leave out the garlic...

Start with grating the cucumber as thinly as possible. Add in first the yogurt, then the dill (you cannot overdose on the dill), garlic, oil, vinegar, salt and pepper to taste. On really hot days, put the salad in the fridge and enjoy once adequately chilled.

Life is good!

Refreshing with ice cold cauliflower salad

Ingredients
1 cauliflower
¼ cup cauliflower broth
canola oil
red wine vinegar
salt & pepper
½ parsley, chopped
1 teaspoon nutmeg

When visiting my grandmother for weeknight suppers, she had always made us a salad, changing with the seasons from beet to cabbage, cauliflower to celery root, carrot to tomato. Tirelessly she would work with what was available in her little vegetable garden and on the market, using always the same recipes and the same techniques she had learned as a young girl in winter school. Abundance nurtures creativity, austerity values the well-known.

On the way to my grandmother’s house, we’d speculate which salad there would be that day, the choice of vegetable being the only unknown variable in the predictability of suppers consisting of thick slices of bread, cheese and cold meats. She lived at the top of a steep hill, and the last ten minutes walking up there in the glittering evening sun got us panting and grasping for air.

The first thing to do upon arrival was to run into the kitchen and go right for the fridge, where the salad of the day would have been cooling for a couple of hours in a beautiful bowl. My day was made if it was cauliflower, my favorite, the cauliflower florets gleaming seductively in their oil and vinegar dressing. With the savage appetite of a still growing teenager, often I could not wait for everyone to sit at the table, instead shoveling one refreshing forkful after the other into my greedy mouth.

Nowadays, cauliflower is sadly underestimated, much like its relative, cabbage. There is nothing glamorous about it, maybe because it grew in our parents' gardens and was cheap, or maybe because no matter what you do with it, it will always stay down to earth and refuse all pomposity and gaudiness? That is what I adore in cauliflower and what I adore in my grandmother’s timeless recipe. It is simple but does bring out the flavor and is as refreshing as a cold lemonade.

To prepare the cauliflower, you just have to wash it, cut the head in half vertically and cut a little cross into the two stalks so it cooks more evenly. Then it has to be boiled in salt water for around 15 minutes, depending on its size. I have noticed that the custom prevails to eat vegetables nearly raw, but this is not what this recipe calls for. The cauliflower shouldn’t be so soft it can be mashed, but tender enough to offer only a little resistance to the bite.
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In the meantime, you can prepare the dressing: some of the water the cauliflower is boiling in, mixed with canola oil (or any neutral tasting vegetable oil), red wine vinegar, salt and pepper, the chopped parsley and a little bit of nutmeg (which complements cauliflower well in general). Once the cauliflower is done, cut it into medium pieces, cover it with the dressing and let the salad rest in the fridge for some minutes (the longer, the better; in fact, this salad tastes even better on the second day). Relax and enjoy ice cold.

Life is good!

The best salad you've ever had

Ingredients

1 clove garlic
3 cups arugula
5 mushrooms, sliced
3 vine tomatoes, sliced
½ avocado, sliced
fresh basil
oil & vinegar


Have you ever stared blankly at the screen of your computer, trying to keep control over your eye lids, stemming all your willpower against the heavy weights that drag them down? If so, you know that all the willpower in the world is not enough and that there is only one way of emerging victorious: the cheap and dirty sugar intake.

So this afternoon, lunch was followed by one chocolate chip cookie after the other, unfortunately of the overly sweet and week-old adamant kind that are sold in cafeterias all around the country and can’t even justify the excess of sugar and fat with their taste. Again, if you have ever been there, you already know the stone that seems to sit in my stomach by the time I get home in the evening. As coming from a different planet, my partner, simmering with excitement, greets me as usual with “what’s for dinner tonight?”.

Well, a salad is just what I need right now, catering to my need for something fresh and juicy, but also hearty enough to make my partner’s heart beat faster. So as you can imagine, I am not talking about the kind of salad that rightfully gained its reputation as a substitute dinner for those on a diet or party poppers, consisting of sad iceberg lettuce and watery tomatoes, that tastes of nothing and some greasy dressing that tastes of old mayonnaise. No, let’s talk about some salad magic.

In a perfect world, where everyone always had the time to stroll around farmers’ markets all day long and the freshest ingredients were always readily at hand, probably just throwing together some salad leaves and slicing up some tomatoes bursting with ripeness would do the trick and sufficiently tickle our taste buds so we’d all love salad. But, making the best out of what life gives you has proven a wise philosophy, and so we’ll make the best of what’s on those supermarket shelves. Believe me, there is a lot of hope there.

As you might have noticed, the majority of readily available salads don’t have a lot of flavor on their own. There are remedies. Some of the packages you can buy contain herbs, others more flavorful species like arugula (which I love using as the main salad green), and anything along those lines that can be added like fresh basil, cilantro, dill and the likes gets you a long way. When choosing tomatoes, those still on the vine usually taste best but as a rule of thump, round ones with thinner flesh and more juice are preferable.

Another trick is to tease out the last bit of flavor from what you’ve got. For this, my first step in preparing a salad is to peel a large clove of garlic, smash it once with the grip of my knife, put it in a glass and spritz some vinegar on it (I use around 2 tablespoons for a regular salad but it all depends on individual taste).

While the garlic infuses the vinegar, leaving behind just the most fleeting hint of the full garlic aroma, I prepare the rest of the salad: throwing arugula in a huge bamboo bowl, slicing up tomatoes, mushrooms and avocado, and generously adding good olive oil (here it’s important to make sure that all the vegetables are covered in a thin oil coating), maybe toasting some bread. A little bit of salt and pepper, maybe some garnishing with fresh herbs, basil being my favorite, and the salad is completed with the vinegar.

The whole procedure takes about 10 minutes and no bite ceases to intrigue me with its alluring mix of sweet and fresh, juicy and soft, creamy and crisp.
Life is good!