Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Salad daze

When summer arrives, the time comes to make salads. A friend’s partner’s birthday was this weekend, and I was asked to make a few salads for the event. I love cooking, and since I’m on the road all the time, I don’t get much of an opportunity. Knowing that, I took it. Salads aren’t my strength, but why not? To make sure I had my bases covered, I chose two different salads. One built around peas and the other built around tomatoes and cucumbers—all perfect summer ingredients.

So, the first salad I made this way. Last night, I chopped up some English cucumbers after deseeding¹ them, slicing them on the bias. Then, I shoved them in a brine of equal parts sugar and salt. I also added some cider vinegar, pickling spices and crushed red chilis. I then let these sit over night, lightly pickling them. This morning, I cut up a few types of tomatoes, including some heirloom varieties, frenched some Vidalia onions and tossed the whole thing with olive oil, sweet pickled garlic, dill, parsley and course sea salt. The result:

The next salad is one that I was inspired by my friend Kristen to create. It isn’t particularly from a recipe, but more just some ideas thrown together. I started by blanching and shocking some petite spring peas and some regular spring peas (to provide textural contrast). They were frozen, I admit, simply because summer peas aren’t really up to snuff yet, and the frozen are better. I blanched them in salty boiling water for 1 minute per batch.

While I was doing that, I also sweated down a large onion diced into small bits in a little olive oil, and bloomed a pinch of saffron in hot water (recovered from the “pea broth”). Once the peas were finished and the onion sweated down, I added the saffron to it and let some of the water evaporate.

In a large bowl I combined them together and mixed with a healthy amount of mint, a very light vinaigrette—heavy on the oil, light on the mustard—and then diced up some ricotta salata into 1/4” cubes and tossed it all together. Finally, I added some pistachios for texture. This was all set aside to meld for a few hours before the party, and here’s the result:

All in all, a success I think. Now to reverse engineer my own recipes for future use. I didn’t bother to write anything down.

¹ I didn’t remove the skin as it’s quite thin on these.