A light, refreshing salad for ushering in the New Year

Like many people, my festive holiday diet has left me feeling the need to reign things in a bit. So imagine my delight to "discover" this excellent, super easy salad tonight. We were having pasta with mushrooms (I know, not exactly diet fare...), and I wanted a vegetable to go with it, and did not want to leave the house. We had carrots, lots of carrots, because my husband bought a whole bag by accident even though we already had an unopened bag at home. So I started searching the indexes of my cookbook for an easy, new, and different carrot recipe and stumbled across this delightful carrot salad from Moosewood Cooks At Home (circa 1994 - this was my old college cookbook!). I have no idea why I haven't been eating this for the past 15 years. See the real cookbook for the actual recipe. Here's the lazy girl adaptation I made:

Ingredients:

- About 1/2 of a one lb. bag baby carrots
- A generous handful of washed and semi-dried fresh parsley (use a salad spinner or pat with a paper towel)
- Juice of one large lemon
- A drizzle of olive oil (about 1-2 tsps)
- One garlic clove
- Salt and pepper to taste

Throw all ingredients into food processor (use the s-shaped blade) and pulse a few times until the carrots are chopped into small dice and the ingredients are well mixed.

Serves 2-4 (main course/side dish)

I know, it doesn't sound like much, but it is surprisingly good. I'll be eating this a lot this month. The original recipe says it keeps well for a few days, so I'll be making big batches and packing it for lunch, to eat with some hummous and pita, a sandwich, or whatever else is in the fridge.

Tonight's dinner - May 2, 2008

Mollie Katzen's After-Work Bulgur Special
From Vegetable Heaven



I like this dish so much, I keep all the ingredients except the scallions and bell pepper on hand all the time (and these ingredients are used in lots of other recipes I like, too).

Before work, boil 1 and 3/4 cup water. Put 1 cup bulgur in a large heatproof bowl (bulgur will expand). Dump water over bulgur, cover tightly, and leave for work.

After work, toss bulgur with a handful of currants, pine nuts, a drizzle of olive oil, 4 chopped scallions, 2 tbs lemon juice, and salt and pepper to taste. For a prettier presentation, put in bell pepper halves and microwave to your preferred doneness.

I should mention that the above after work preparation took about 10 mins, and was highly entertaining to my toddler, who enjoyed his front row seat at the cooking show. This is how I usually make dinner, with him safely strapped into his high chair, after he's eaten his dinner. He'll only sit there happily for 10-15 mins, so whatever I do can't take long.


Caprese salad




A simple plate of sliced fresh mozzarella, sliced tomato, fresh basil, and olives drizzled with olive oil, salt, and pepper.

I made up the salad while my husband gave our son his bedtime snack.

Lovely Friday night dinner.

Iced Tea

This isn't a recipe, more of a note that, um, it's really easy to make your own iced tea. We were buying lots of the Trader Joe white tea iced tea, which is really good and nearly sugar-free, but then I realized that's kinda silly. And I feel guilty about throwing away (even with recycling) all of those big plastic containers it comes in. So now I make iced tea a lot. Boil a big pot of water. Turn off heat. Throw in a few teabags of any variety. Sweeten with honey if desired. Let cool. Pour in pitcher. Store in fridge. It pretty much makes itself, and we can experiment with herbal teas, green teas, whatever is in our tea shelf (and frankly needs to be used up). Seems kinda duh. I don't know why we weren't doing this before.

And weirdly, when I offer my homemade iced tea to guests, they seem delighted. So I'm thinking maybe others, like me, just thought of iced tea as something you buy in the store or order in a cafe.

Note added 7/18/08 - this is kind of embarrassing, but I recently started boiling just a cup of water, making super-strong tea, and then diluting with cold water, for even faster, more energy-efficient iced tea making. Don't know why this didn't occur to me before. It was written on the side of my box of tea!

A favorite breakfast - Swiss Bircher Muesli

This is a delicious and simple mix of raw oats, milk, yogurt, fruit, and/or nuts. This sounds gross, but magic happens as the oats soak, and they become almost pudding-like. Yum!

I don't follow a recipe exactly, but here's one to get you started.

I soak the oats in soymilk (not apple juice as indicated in the link above) with the shredded apple overnight in a covered bowl in the fridge. In the morning, I mix in yogurt, fresh fruit and/or dried fruit, cinnamon, and honey or 100% real maple syrup.

I've only made this a few times, so I've made it a little different each time. It's a fun dish to experiment with - you can change up the type of milk/juice, yogurt, fruit, spice, and sweetener and still get a great result.

Extra tips: Only enough milk to cover the oats, otherwise you get soup. And I use my food processor to shred the apple in like 1 minute. And I leave the apple peel on.

Last night's dinner - Giant Mushroom Popover

Giant Mushroom Popover by Mollie Katzen
Organic mixed greens with feta, olive, and tomato
A glass of red wine, extra wonderful after a long day of work

Excellent. This was the second time I made this. I foolishly left the lid on when I put it in the oven, so it didn't rise as well as I had hoped. But it was still delicious. I followed Mollie's suggestion to make the mushrooms ahead of time and store them in the fridge, so after work all I had to do was warm the mushrooms, add the batter, and bake.