Recipe: a spinach salad for Sarah. 19 September 2008 11:31 am
Posted by Tracy in : vegan, salad, events, recipes, vegetarian, friends, eugene, restaurants , 1 comment so far
Another month, another round of No Croutons Required. I haven’t played along since mushroom miso soup, in April, but this time, the challenge from Holler at Tinned Tomatoes was: use fruit in a soup or salad, and it was the excuse I needed to finally get around to writing this recipe up for Sarah, like I promised to do back in May. Yes, I’m a giant slacker.
Speaking of slackery, it’s not laziness that makes me a raw salad minimalist. Instead, it’s because I like to taste food as a recipe comes together, and if I’m not cooking salad ingredients, they usually don’t go through enough of a transformation to keep me interested if I’ve already eaten a bit of everything involved. Peter doesn’t have this problem, and he likes salad much more than I do, so he makes a lot of the salads we eat. But when I’m in charge of salad, I try to keep it simple, lest lunch or dinner fall victim to my sampling habits and short attention span. An added side effect of this approach is that minimalist salads are somehow much fancier than mixed greens with the works.
To get back to the theme of this month’s event, there’s a formula for a green salad so fancy it hardly even needs a vinaigrette: (more…)
Monkey Monday: happy salad season! 30 June 2008 1:03 pm
Posted by Tracy in : salad, nutrition, seasonality, news, eating, cooking , 3 commentsSo a New York Times health blog headline caught my eye this morning: The 11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating, and when I clicked through, the images at the top of the post made me laugh. Why? Well, they had pictures of beets and cabbage, and this is what I had for dinner on Saturday night:
Yep, that’s coleslaw, beet salad, and my favorite lentil salad (that last on a bed of spinach). (more…)
Fotos before Friday: in which I sing the praises of Halloumi cheese 6 December 2007 9:10 pm
Posted by Tracy in : work, salad, tea, cheese, sundance, eating, vegetarian, cooking , add a commentThis post is dedicated to Jonathan, who was a little grossed out upon overhearing Peter’s half of tonight’s dinner plan phone conversation, but I won’t hold it against him; he takes mighty fine pictures. Anyway…
It’s been more than a year since I resigned from running the Sundance cheese department, and that was a few months after the last (and fortunately first and only) time the walk-in cooler broke down on my watch. When this happened (and it happened at least twice during my time at Sundance), the cheesehead (I did love my title, though I also went by cheesebeast) would recruit a helper or two, and a few shopping carts, which would be used to take all the back stock out of the cheese cooler to the walk-in fridge in the warehouse. If the cooler hadn’t been broken for too long, all the cheese in the displays could be moved as well. That was the case when the cooler went down on my watch (because we checked it obsessively and moved quickly when the temperature had been in “the danger zone” of above 40 degrees F for more than an hour). However, the other time I was present at Sundance for a deli walk-in failure, someone came into the deli in the morning and discovered that the cooler was at 50 degrees F — and had no way of knowing how long it had been too warm. In this case, to be on the safe side (and because doing otherwise would be a health code violation), none of the cheese that had been in that cooler overnight could be sold. The cheese worker that day spent it weighing all the cheese that was deemed no good, writing a long list of product lost, and filling the cooler’s free food shelf, over and over again. All the cheese eaters at Sundance that day made out like bandits.
What does this have to do with Halloumi cheese, you may ask? (more…)
Recipe: My Favorite Lentil Salad 12 June 2007 10:49 pm
Posted by Tracy in : vegan, seasonality, salad, America's Test Kitchen, cheese, recipes, restaurants, eating, eugene, vegetarian, cooking , 4 commentsIt’s like lentil appreciation week here at TracyFood headquarters, I swear. Yesterday I made Madhur Jaffrey’s Green Lentils With Spinach for dinner, and today I made this salad: a fantastic summer-y meal that can be hearty without being heavy — but only if you have the self control not to eat a double portion, which is difficult because it’s so darn delicious. (more…)
Friday photos and fun! 8 June 2007 9:14 pm
Posted by Tracy in : pictures, salad, garden, baking, school, people, dessert, friends , 2 commentsSummary: the end of spring term at the Urban Farm, a really big bottle of wine, and an invitation! With pictures! For everybody (like me) who’s less visually and more verbally inclined, I was going to post a big list of fun things I’ve been reading lately as well, but that little project will have to wait until Monkey Monday because I am all tired from playing in the garden for hours (take that, rosemary bush!) and filling up on delicious dinner (soft corn tacos with garlicky greens and refried beans, from Jack Bishop’s A Year In a Vegetarian Kitchen). The weekend is certainly off to a good start. But I digress. (more…)
