Salads – Page 5 – Rosemary and the Goat

Pickled Yellow Squash

Take advantage of your summer harvest.

I’ve been doing a lot of pickling lately; first my roasted yellow pickled beets and now this pickled yellow squash.

Even if you don’t have a garden you can take advantage of finding great deals on produce and then canning some to enjoy in the winter. I didn’t find a great deal at the farmer’s market; their yellow squash was $3.00/lb. I bought one pound of their squash and then went to my HEB and bought 6 lbs. at $.99/lb. Now that’s a deal.

My mother and dad both use to can things. It seemed like it was more my mother canning tomatoes and pickles from my dad’s garden and then after my dad retired they both tried their hand(s) at pickled okra, beets. When they moved over to Reelfoot Lake he even canned some fish he had caught then they would make fish cakes out of the canned fish. Now, I wasn’t too keen on trying that recipe but I’m sure if he made it, it was good.

I’ve canned some marmalade before and some fig jam and even some cognac raisins to serve with cheese. Oh, I forgot, one of my sister’s (Terry) best canned items is her chow chow. It is better than any chow chow you will ever find in a grocery store and when I can get tomatoes for 50 cents a lb. I make some. I have to go to Missouri to get tomatoes at that price.

August 11, 2016 By Sherry

Salads

Tomato and Arugula Salad

All those fresh summer vegetables in one salad.

Don’t you just love the taste of arugula? The peppery taste is delicious mixed with tomatoes and I love it on sandwiches in place of lettuce or sautéed a little bit and put into an omelette.

This salad was another idea I had one night when faced with a refrigerator full of vegetables and a brand new package of arugula and after looking on the internet I found others had beaten me to the punch or should I say, recipe. I used Bobby Flay’s Vinaigrette recipe but my own farm truck list of ingredients for the salad.

There’s nothing better than summer tomatoes and over the 4th of July, my son Paul brought a ton (not actually a ton) of tomatoes to me; so many he made 6 pints of roasted salsa that we can enjoy through the summer. I’m thinking when my husband is in the pool and wants a snack I can go pop open a jar of salsa and serve it to him pool side with some chips (not homemade of course).

I’ve gotten where I only buy English cucumbers, that is unless I can get the small pickling type. I love the deep ridges in the English cucumbers and they don’t have as many seeds on the inside and they looked so pretty in this salad.

August 1, 2016 By Sherry

Salads

Salad LÜKE

Loved John Besh’s Salad Luke.

We tried our best to eat as much as we could on a recent trip to New Orleans; and as usual I found several things I wanted to try and make once returning home.

My sister and I both were in speech classes until about 4th grade because we couldn’t pronounce our “r’s” correctly and I’m always flubbing up on pronouncing certain words. One night in New Orleans we had dinner at Luke, one of John Besh’s restaurants. So, all day I’m thinking “now how is this pronounced”. Is it like Lu-kay, or lu-kee or luck. When we were seated that night, the first thing I ask the waiter is how to pronounce Luke and he said “Luke, I don’t know what the two dots are doing over the “U” “. At least I won’t be pronouncing this one wrong again.

Their Salad Luke was such a simple salad but the appeal to me was all in the presentation. The plate had a little puddle of buttermilk dressing, topped with some celery root, golden beets and shreds of carrots, then one leaf of butter lettuce sitting on the plate like a little bowl, then drizzle of dressing then 3 or 4 more stacks of the leaves/dressing, making the stack about 4-5” tall but only about 4 – 5 leaves of lettuce. Very pretty and impressed me enough I couldn’t wait to make my own pickled yellow beets and my own buttermilk dressing.

July 17, 2016 By Sherry

Salads/ Side dish

Pickled Roasted Golden Beets

Love these golden beets!

My husband has always said he doesn’t like beets because they are red and he doesn’t like red food. Now that doesn’t make sense since he does eat catsup, tomatoes, etc. So I decided to make golden beets to use in a salad similar to one I had at Luke’s Restaurant in New Orleans. That recipe will come in a couple of days.

Usually the beets I eat are pickled. For years, that was the only thing I knew to do with a beet. And, of course, they were red beets that I pickled and they bled all over everything and if I wasn’t careful I would end up with a blood-splattered looking top.

After I started this blog I became more adventurous in trying new recipes. I’ve always liked cooking but never really went out on a limb to try different things. Then I tried fried beets once at East Side Kings in Austin and I made them almost immediately after returning home. My French Fried Beets with Japanese Mayonnaise is one of my favorite appetizers; I now cut them in slices and not chunks like ESK make their’s. Then my next adventure in beets was with my Roasted Beet Napoleon; stacks of deliciousness. And, who could pass up my Pink Heart Egg Finger Sandwiches where I used the beet juice to dye my hard-boiled eggs then cut tiny beet hearts as a garnish for the egg sandwich.

July 12, 2016 By Sherry

Appetizers/ HotApp/ Salads/ Side dish

BLT Stacked Tomatoes

One of my favorite foods from Savannah.

Do you find it hard to pass up a fried green tomato? Well I do and while visiting in Savannah back in April I saw them on every menu I looked at along with shrimp and grits and pimento cheese .

I grew up eating fried green tomatoes. My dad had the best garden ever and “organic” before most people even though of growing anything without a lot of pesticides. He made his own garlic spray that he would spray on his plants for bugs and he even hooked up a pump in the lake they lived on (after retirement) and use that water to water his garden.

Over the years of our gardening we would grow all types of tomatoes and I could not wait to see the first green tomatoes get big enough to pick and fry and believe me it was hard to pick them knowing in just a few days we would have beautiful vine ripen tomatoes. But, that was never a hard decision for me to make — pick or not pick.

Have you ever had fried green tomatoes with pimento cheese on top? I haven’t either but saw it on some menus in Savannah. I have posted a Fried Green Tomato with Black Eyed Pea Vinaigrette and a Fried Green Tomato with Ravigote Sauce.

July 7, 2016 By Sherry

Salads

Pasta and Arugula Salad and Herb Dressing

What to do with these ingredients.

With all of these ingredients left over from the weekend I had an idea to use my pasta and arugula in a salad but didn’t know what type of dressing. So I “googled” and believe it or not there were a lot of people that had already beaten me to this salad idea. So I took Food and Wine’s recipe and added a couple of things.

Like I was saying in another post, I always buy too much food when my kids come home, in fact, when anyone comes over. A few weekends ago when my daughter came I had bought some cute pasta to use in a pasta salad and never got around to using it, I also had bought some frozen petite peas that I was going to use to make my pasta pesto saladthat I had made for our garden club luncheon last year. That was the easiest salad ever. But along with those two ingredients I had a whole box of baby arugula and some very pretty colored cherry tomatoes in orange, purple, red and yellow.

I have a weakness for “cute” pastas. This particular one was a trottole pasta (looks like spinning tops (that’s a toy if you didn’t know what a “top” was)) and who could resist Orechetti (little ears), or little O’s, ABC’s, coral shapes and I’ve even bought Maple leaf shaped pasta when we visited Canada, and of course I have bought Texas shaped pasta.

June 16, 2016 By Sherry

Entree/ Pork/ Salads

Grilled Pork Chop and Roasted Apple Salad

Eat those greens!

Do you love your greens and vegetables? Did your parent always say “eat your vegetables”. I feel like I’m saying that to my husband these days as he just informed me, after almost 47 years of marriage, that he doesn’t really like most vegetables. He just eats them because I make them and if he doesn’t I guess there isn’t much left to eat other than meat. He does like salads though so I get to experiment a lot with recipes.

I love greens whether it is cooked cabbage, kale, chards, baby bok choy, spinach, lettuces, you name it I like greens. Have to admit, though, that I have never cooked collard greens. We have even grilled romaine lettuce and that’s delicious when you turn it into a chopped Caesar salad. I’ve mixed kale with mashed cauliflower, I’ve put it in turkey kale soup and I’m sure there are a lot of other recipes out there using greens in recipe that I haven’t even come across yet.

I love looking at menus and trying to recreate dishes. A friend of mine was in New Orleans last year and dined at K-Paul’s so I went to their website to see what she might be eating (weird huh). This salad sounded so interesting and there really isn’t a need for a recipe. After thinking about making this salad I decided to turn it into a main dish salad by adding the grilled pork chops that I glazed with some more of the red apple balsamic vinegar, then cut the chops into strips to put on top of the salad. I love pork and apples together and this way I did not have to come up with a meat to go with the salad. My daughter asked me if I had ever put pork on a salad and I thought “why not”, we put shrimp, chicken, steak, tuna, and even bbq on top of some shredded cabbage so why not a pork chop.

April 29, 2016 By Sherry

Salads

Cucumber Noodle Salad

Ever see green noodles? These are cucumber.

Do you have a lot of tools/pans in your kitchen pantry? I have way to many but I NEED them. Never know when I might need one of them to make something special. The spiralizer is my newest gadget. See picture of my pan pantry below and this doesn’t even include my gadgets hiding away in my drawer or mini tart tins and cookie cutters in pull out bins. I even have a strawberry huller/pinfeather plucker and I never intend on plucking a chicken.

I first tried making cucumber noodles when I made my Spiralized Veggies with Salmon; now, I’m on the search for anything to twist out of my Paderno Pro 4 Blade Spiralizer. English cucumbers definitely work the best if you can find them.

Yikes, it is almost swimming season and if we start heating our pool this month then I’m in trouble (the dreaded swimsuit season is here). Aren’t we all looking for new recipes for the summer to take to get togethers? Honestly, I don’t think I will ever get tired of cooking and trying out new recipe as long as there is someone around to try them out and with my husband I can always count on getting a thumbs up or thumbs down. I hope for a thumbs up, of course, and the thumbs down never make it on this blog.

April 14, 2016 By Sherry

Appetizers/ Salads/ Sandwiches

Smoked Chicken Salad with Cranberries and Roasted Pecans

Not for a sandwich kind of chicken salad.

Back when we were first married my husband always wanted me to put apples in our tuna fish salad sandwiches. Yuck, I would say, fruit doesn’t belong on a sandwich and if he wanted apples in his then he would chop some up and put on his sandwich. When it comes to any creamy type salad that goes on a sandwich my opinion is NO fruit.

But, I have changed my mind over the years (not about fruit on sandwich) about adding fruit to things like chicken salad. There are so many chicken salads that have fruit like grapes, oranges, pineapple and this one has dried cranberries. To me this type salad has to be eaten with a fork or in this case I’m using some endive leaves and radicchio as little containers and also some crackers on the side. And funny thing, the day after my bunco group ate this my husband wanted some for lunch and he said do you have any bread, and I said Noooo, you can’t have bread with that kind of chicken salad. I know that’s crazy but I gave him a fist full of crackers instead.

There are two things I always feel like make a salad recipe better, that is, if it calls for chicken or nuts you use smoked meat and roasted nuts. I do my nuts in the microwave on a Pampered Chef small baking stone and we always have something on the Kamado Joe Smoker I can use in a salad.

April 4, 2016 By Sherry

Salads

Blood Orange and Mango Salad

There’s nothing prettier than an orange salad made with a blood orange.

Can’t say I’ve ever been a big OJ fan. (I love the orange but just not in juice form.) I use to drink OJ when I bought it for the kids when they were little but I would have much rather had a glass of grapefruit juice. Have you ever had a grapefruit mimosa instead of one made with OJ. Once you have, you will never go back.

Did you ever get oranges in your Christmas stocking. I remember getting them, don’t know how often, or why I remember that but maybe that was a way of filling up the stocking; who knows.

Some of the most delicious oranges I have tasted were in Madrid. I’m not sure what they were called but they were candied. I attempted to make these after returning from that trip and the first time they turned out great (Second time I think I burned them.). These Candied Orange Quarters were the best thing I ever tasted. Ya know those little sugared orange slices you get in a bag for $1, well those are my husband’s favorite candy, but the candied ones were 1,000 times better than those and he loved them.

February 24, 2016 By Sherry

Salads

Shaved Zucchini Salad

Shaved Zucchini Salad with Pumpkin Seeds Parmesan Cheese.

Are you looking for some new salad ideas to start the year off right?

You don’t have to wait for summer vegetables to make this zucchini salad. There is no reason to wait to make this salad since we can always find fresh zucchini and yellow squash in the market. Of course, if you had it growing in your back yard, then that would be even fresher/better.

Zucchini was developed in Italy in the late 19th century; and is a vegetable that is typically served cooked and has a delicate flavor and requires very little cooking in a little butter or olive oil. On the other hand, you always see zucchini on vegetable platters so it can be used in many dishes; zucchini bread is the best.

What attracted me to this recipe in the first place was the way the zucchini/squash was cut; most recipes you see for zucchini salad has it sliced in circles, shredded or cut into long thin ribbon pieces. I like the bigger slices because you can still tell what the vegetable once was.

I once worked for a catering company in Kansas City and I always remember how they always wanted vegetables, whether they were for a salad or for grilling, cut into large chunks/pieces because they thought it made for a better presentation. I agree.

This recipe came from Silver Oak Winery and they suggest it for a summer salad. I’m saying put with any grilled meat and you will have a great salad in place of your normal green salad you may serve.

January 20, 2016 By Sherry

Salads

Spicy Bean Sprout Salad

This is so easy, I’m almost embarrassed to tell you about it.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone and I hope every eats and enjoys the day without worrying about calories. When I decided to post this Asian salad it brought back memories of The Christmas Story (movie) (not this recipe but Chinese food) and how the dogs got into the house, ate the Christmas turkey and the family had to go out for Chinese food for Christmas Day. Well, that won’t happen at our house but this is a great little starter appetizer/salad to serve if you are doing anything Asian.

I love small plate restaurants, especially when you order lots and lots of small plates which we did the night we ate at this Japanese bar in Northbrook, IL. and this bean sprout salad was served to us when we first sat down.

I’ve had some unusual small plates recently — pig tail in Austin at Swift’s Attic and also Pig Cheeks also from there. The Pig Cheeks were great because they were fall off the jaw tender (ha, that’s funny) and served with crispy toast that we spread with fig jam, then Dijon mustard, then the shredded braised spicy pig cheek. Yum. Blistered shishito peppers is another small plate we have tried. Even though I have made those several times (after having them in Vego, Spain) I will always order them in a restaurant. Fried Eggplant Chips with Honey Drizzle was a small plate that we had in Seville, Spain and I had to recreate it as soon as we got home. We’ve tried tripe also on a small plate; I was glad that was a small plate.

November 25, 2015 By Sherry

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