Secret Recipe Club is fast approaching. We made my recipe Friday night. No, I'm not going to jump the gun and show you! But, I will tell you about the lovely salad we had alongside our entree...
I don't know about your grocery store, but ours tend to have bargain book bins. After a great deal of hunting, I sometimes find a cookbook or two that I just can't live without. My family room is littered with cookbooks I just couldn't live without. I have to live to at least 550 to even make a dent in all the recipes I'd like to try. Off the top of my head I can't tell you which recipe triggered my picking up Jamie's America. It's Jamie Oliver's twists on American favorites. Like a NY cheesecake with a meringue topping. I know. Go figure. Then, I got to Waldorf Salad My Way. Now, I've never been much of a fan of Waldorf Salad. It's just too cloying for my taste. Individually, I love apples and grapes and celery and nuts. But, not gummed up with sweetened mayo. Bleech.
Thursday evening, we went to a retirement party for one of my favorite attorneys. He's a great guy and truly exceptional at his specialty. I was honored to be among those invited to wish him a wonderful retirement. After the cocktail party we headed to the store to get everything we needed to make my Secret Recipe Club recipe. In addition I bought a bunch of asparagus and a rotisserie chicken. I figured that'd take care of us until Saturday when I'd had an opportunity to make out a menu.
Friday, I had a massage. Margi worked her fingers to the bone trying to get me to a semi-normal range of motion. Normally, after a massage I just want to curl up in a chair and chill. Not
Friday. I was raring to go. And, the Waldorf Salad had been on my mind all day.
I'd had a crispy, sweet, tart Gala apple earlier in the week and it had totally
hit the spot. Fine, I'd go ahead and make the menu for the week and head to the
store Friday evening. Best part about that? Connie vacuumed the house while I went to the grocery. I'll take that trade-off any day.
Another 9pm dinner. But, I've finally found a Waldorf salad that I LOVE! And the fabulous dressing will go with SO many salads. BTW - when you read the ingredients I've copied them mostly verbatim from Jamie's recipe. I love how he phrases the list. Here's how you put it together:
Waldorf Salad My Way
Ingredients:
4 large handfuls of interesting green salad leaves, washed and spun dry
2 seedless red or green grapes, halved
3 medium celery stalks, trimmed and sliced
2 large handfuls walnuts, roughly crumbled
a small bunch of Italian parsley, chopped
1 red apple (I used Gala,) diced
6 oz blue cheese (I used about 2 oz)
for the dressing:
1 heaped teaspoon Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons red or white wine vinegar
good quality extra virgin olive oil
1 heaped tablespoon natural yogurt (I used Greek)
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Directions:
Toast the walnuts.
Whisk together the dressing ingredients.
Toss the grapes, celery, walnuts, parsley and apple with the dressing.
You can either toss the greens with the other ingredients or mound the apple mixture on top of the greens. Crumble the blue cheese over the salad and drizzle with a bit more extra virgin olive oil.
adapted from Jamie's America
OPA! Don't you love going to a Greek restaurant and watching them light the halloumi cheese on fire then yell OPA? We do too. Last time we were at Jungle Jim's, we bought a package of halloumi cheese. The expiration date was October of 2011, so I was in no rush to find an excuse to grill it. Then, along came the June/July issue of Fine Cooking. A grilling issue. With an article about 13 Things You Didn't Know You Could Grill. Except, we'd already grilled 10 of the 13. Not a bad record.
Here are the 13 things: nuts, fruit, pizza, shellfish, quesadillas, salad, olives, avocados, bacon, flatbread, cake, herbs and cheese. Some of our favorite grilled goodies from that list include Caesar Pizza,
Grilled Lettuce,
Smoked Goat Cheese,
Grilled Rosemary Old Fashioneds,
Grilled Fruit a
and Cat Cora's Grilled Guacamole.
I read the page to Connie and we had a good laugh over how many of the items we'd actually tried - most of them more than once. Then, I turned the page and there was a homerun recipe. It sounded like it'd make a perfect appetizer for Saturday evening. Not that we typically have appetizers when it's just the two of us. But, what a fun idea.
What did we think? The recipe says you can actually make a dinner out of this. Had I not had my version of bangers and mash already underway, this would have been dinner. Fabulous. Fantastic. Absolute five. Grilling the grapes concentrated their flavor. I made a couple of small changes. The recipe didn't call for grilling either the garlic or the rosemary. I grilled both. The garlic was perfect. The rosemary got a bit lost but I'm not sure that was a bad thing. It easily could have overpowered other flavors.
Grilled Halloumi with Grape Relish
Ingredients:
1 medium red onion, cut into 3-4 slices
4 t olive oil
12 oz halloumi cheese, cut in 3/8" thick slabs
2 T olive oil
2 large garlic cloves
1 small loaf ciabatti or foccacia, sliced
1/2 c walnuts
1 sprig fresh rosemary
1 large bunch seedless red or black grapes
2 T balsamic vinegar - I omitted this
Directions:
This is one of those recipes where it's imperative to have everything ready to go before you start cooking anything. Heat your grill. Put the walnuts in a foil "basket." Put the sliced onions, garlic, walnuts, rosemary and bunch of grapes in a grill basket.
Drizzle the onions and garlic with olive oil. Cook them on the grill over direct heat. Watch them carefully because the walnuts will get toasty pretty quickly. Ditto the rosemary. Turn the onions, garlic and grapes once. Pull the basket off the heat when the grapes are cooked to bursting. Take everything out of the grill basket and put the halloumi in it if it's cracking like mine did.
If it's in nice slabs, you can put it directly on the grill grates. Smash the garlic and mix it with 2T of olive oil. Brush the bread slices with the olive oil. Schmear on the leftover garlic pieces.
Now, it's time to grill the cheese and bread. Put the bread on a couple of minutes after the cheese because it will take a lot less time to grill. You want the cheese to be bubbly with lovely grill marks. Because mine was cracking, I have lovely grill basket bubbles :-) While the cheese is grilling, take all the grapes off and put them in a bowl.
Reach in and smoosh them with your hands.
Chop the walnuts and rosemary and add them to the grapes.
Then, chop the onions and add them.
Remove the cheese and bread from the grill. Now, the cheese and bread go on a platter and the grape relish (more a salsa in my opinion!) goes in a bowl.
I found that drizzling the bread with a bit of the juice in the relish before putting on a piece of cheese was a great idea.
Adapted from Fine Cooking
Poor Connie. I feed him a lot of fruit. He's not terribly fond of fruit but most of the time he gamely eats it. I'm not great at eating just a piece of fruit myself so I make sure to include it in salads on a regular basis. This salad has been on the menu for a couple of weeks. First the avocados weren't any good so I had to buy more and wait for them to soften. Then, this didn't go with any of the meals we were having. Finally, along came spinach lasagna and I thought we'd have a great match.
The salad was great. The spinach lasagna, not so much. I was testing the recipe for a magazine so I'm not allowed to say much. But, my comment would be that the texture was like baby food and it tasted just about the same. The rest is headed for the trash. Thank goodness the salad was wonderful!
I left the grapes in the fridge at the office so they didn't go in. I'm not sure I'll add them next time even if they do make their way to the home fridge.
What did we think? We would have loved more ginger flavor. I thought it added a bit of heat to the dressing but not much else. Connie would've mixed the cilantro into the dressing. I was ok with it on top of the salad but would've liked it in the dressing also. Otherwise this was great. Very refreshing and a unique blend of flavors.
Summer Fruit Salad
Ingredients:
1/2 c bottled poppy seed dressing
2 t freshly grated ginger
2 avocados, thinly sliced
4 c loosely packed arugula
2 c halved seedless green grapes
1 mango, julienned
1 c diced fresh strawberries
1/4 c thinly sliced green onions
1/4 c chopped fresh cilantro
Directions:
Mix the poppyseed dressing and the ginger.
Toss the rest of the ingredients with the dressing. Serve. As you can see in the photo, I used the avocado as a "bowl" for the dressing. Next time I'll try tossing the salad as the instructions said.
adapted from Southern Living
I've seen photos of this cake several times. It got to the point that I didn't care what in the heck it tasted like, I wanted to make it because it looked so daggone cool. I bought grapes to make it. Please don't ask how many boxes of grapes went to the compost bin. We're just not dessert eaters. So, it didn't get made. Perpetual menu item. Always a bridesmaid, never the bride. Well, this last weekend, this cake became the bride. Thank goodness! It was easy to make, tasted really good and yes, it looked incredible. We ate it for dessert, then we ate it for breakfast. It was great both times. I'd have liked for it to be just a wee bit more moist but my guess is that how it tasted was how it's supposed to taste. We'll make it again - for the cool factor and the fact it really does taste great.
Winemakers Grape Cake
Ingredients:
Butter and flour for preparing the cake pan
2 large eggs, at room temperature
2/3 c sugar
4 T unsalted butter, melted
1/4 c extra-virgin olive oil
1/3 c milk
1/2 t vanilla
1 1/2 c flour
3/4 t baking powder
A pinch of salt
zest of 1 lemon
zest of 1 orange
10 oz small, fresh purple grapes
Powdered sugar, for garnish
Directions:
Preheat your oven to 350°. Butter and flour your springform pan. Make sure you shake out any excess flour.
Combine the eggs and sugar in your mixer. Beat them until they're thick and lemon-colored.
Then, add the butter, olive oil, milk and vanilla.
Mix them until they're blended.
Next, your dry ingredients. Sift the flour into a large bowl. Add the baking powder and salt. Then, add the lemon zest and the orange zest.
Toss them well to assure they're well coated with flour.
Pour the flour mixture into the egg/sugar mixture. Stir with a wooden spoon until well blended.
Put the bowl aside for 10 minutes. That will allow time for the flour to absorb the liquids.
Stir the grapes into the batter.
Spoon the batter into the springform pan.
Arrange the grapes in a pleasing pattern.
Bake for 55 minutes at 350. The top will be dark golden brown and will feel quite firm when pressed. Cool, the top with a dusting of powdered sugar. Serve in thin wedges.
adapted from Epicurious
