Heidi Swanson’s Tassajara warm cabbage salad – Recipe Test Drive
You only think you know how good this recipe might taste. I’m pretty good at reading recipes, in that I can tell not only what a recipe will taste like, but also what to alter to make it better.
I left this one completely alone.
My carnivorous husband, who moans and groans when I serve a vegetarian dinner, said he’d eat this dish as a stand-alone meal. He just offered that information, mind you, he was not asked.
Are you convinced yet?
Bean and Ham soup: A Redneck treat – Redneck cooking
I have always liked beans. They are cheap, easy to store, and will last a long time if stored properly. There are many varieties of dry beans available. With so many different beans to choose from you can change the flavor of any dish just by changing the type of bean used. Whether pinto, lima, garbanzo, or great northern, they each have a distinct and unique texture and flavor. When made into soup they all provide a tasty and filling meal that will warm you up on a cold winter day and give you plenty of energy to get you through the toughest of days.
Tamale pie, black bean sweet potato chili and other one dish wonders – Recipe Roundup
Each week, fabulous recipes grace Debbie’s in-box and pop up on her computer screen, and she’s sharing her favorites with you.
Remember when I posted all of those freeze ahead meals? I’m still on my one dish kick. I guess I’m not so much scouring the internet for one dish meals, but when they cross my path I can’t help but perk up and take notice.
Well, I certainly noticed these casserole and soup recipes this week. The other theme, besides being cooked in one dish? Flavor, and lots of it.
Black bean, corn and tomatillo salad
Tomatillos are a very special fruit / vegetable (you know, that no man’s land of classification, like the tomato). I think of them as lemony tomatoes, and although they are traditionally used in Mexican cooking, I think they can transcend to any style of cooking were you want that tart little punch.
I chose to use our 8 little fresh tomatillos in a black bean / corn salad that I whipped up and served alongside Southwestern rubbed salmon. It was an easy meal to prepare (yeah, I used a premade rub for the fish, but I’m still able to sleep at night) and was a hit with the young and old in our family.
Cucumber tomato salad with fresh basil – Fresh Foodie
Join Debbie as she raves about whole foods, rants about chemicals and generally celebrates cooking and eating with fresh, local, nutritious foods. And sometimes she might get a little feisty….
Sometimes you’ve got to make a basic dish, one that celebrates all there is to love about freshly harvested food. Can I just brag about our cucumbers for a moment? Or should I say cucumber, because it’s the only one we’ve gotten off of our pathetic plant this year, but I do believe it was the best cucumber I’ve ever tasted in my life — no, not just because we grew it. It was superiorly crunchy (even compared with two local farms’ cucumbers) and juicy and had a distinctive “snap” when you bit into it. Perfect.
Something special had to come of the magical cucumber. We tend to just eat what we pick as close to immediately as humanly possible, though cucumbers thwart us with their thick, tough skin. Which was a good thing, in this case, because it was still around to make a simple side dish that was so fresh and yummy and actually highlighted the perfect texture of my prized cucumber.
Quinoa and edamame salad with grilled shrimp
There’s something so much fun about getting my edamame harvest every year from our CSA farm. Maybe it’s because I don’t eat unfermented soy normally, so it feels like cheating, or going off the diet or simply indulging. Or it could be simply that it’s fun to cook something I never cook, and the hulling of the soybeans after they are boiled is a bit of a job. I feel like a farmer back in the days when you couldn’t just go buy frozen edamame that are already prepared. You know, like in Little House on the Prairie.
I keep this recipe really simple because I wanted to highlight all of the farm fresh veggies — and edamame! — in it, so the dressing is very light. The rice vinegar makes it a little bit sweet so it balances out the spicy radishes nicely. The crunchy raw “chunks” balace the slightly mushy cooked quinoa, so it’s got a lot of textural interest, besides just looking oh so pretty.
We just grilled up some shrimp with BBQ sauce to serve with it, but it would make a vegetarian main dish on its own, or you could pair your favorite grilled protein with it to make it your own. I’ll also include a little trick to give it a kick of flavor if you don’t like the “keep it simple” approach.
Potato salad with August’s harvest – Fresh Foodie
Join Debbie as she raves about whole foods, rants about chemicals and generally celebrates cooking and eating with fresh, local, nutritious foods. And sometimes she might get a little feisty….
Really, what could be fresher than a potato salad made up almost entirely of ingredients from this week’s CSA farm harvest? Yes, it’s true: with the heat wave has come the vegetable wave, and we are finally getting a decent amount of veggies each week; a good variety too.
So while we’re still waiting for the tomatoes (I don’t suppose 10 cherries count?), there are still lots of other goodies in this salad: Yukon gold potatoes, corn, radicchio, zucchini, fresh basil and chives, all from our CSA farm. I tried to counterbalance the bitterness of the radicchio (only a selling point in my opinion) with the sweetness of some of the other ingredients as well as the balsamic vinegar dressing, and it turned out just the way I wanted it. If you’re not a fan of the bitter greens, you can use any greens you like, or blend some of the radicchio with something less strong to get the flavor you love.
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