Summer salads

Summer's such a great time for salads. They're an ideal way to use a variety of produce, and if you make big batches, they make for an easy lunch or supper without having to turn on the stove. These are two recipes I made for the first time this year. Both are tasty, and both have made repeat turns in my kitchen over the last few weeks. And not surprisingly, both come courtesy of Jaime Oliver.

First up is a great pasta salad. The basic recipe is fantastic, but I modified it a little to add some protein in the form of beans and lentils. This makes a quick lunch for a number of days running.
One fun thing about this salad is the dressing. While the pasta's cooking (and the lentils in my case), you add in three cloves of garlic into the water during the last few minutes. This softens the garlic a little, so you can mash it up in your mortar and pestle to serve as a base for your dressing. It's fun to do and gets out some aggressions along the way.

With the dressing out of the way, next up is the chopping. It takes a little time, so make sure you have a good podcast on in the background (my latest faves are Here's the Thing, with Alec Baldwin and WTF with Marc Maron).

This last photo is particularly terrible, but the lighting wasn't cooperating with me for the shoot. Trust me that the final product is prettier than this.

And here's an only slightly better shot of the other salad, a great combination of beet and green apple. Toss in a little mint or basil, dress lightly with lime juice, olive oil and some salt and pepper, and you've got yourself a winner. This one was a hit with my niece recently, especially after I told her eating it would turn her pee pink.

Best Pasta Salad
adapted from jamieoliver.com and itaintmeatbabe.com

1 cup dried lentils (I like lentils du puy)
1/2 cup cooked or canned black beans (or beans of your choice)
11 oz small shells pasta
3 fairly small cloves of garlic still in their skins
1 1/2 cups yellow cherry tomatoes, quartered
1 1/2 cups red cherry tomatoes, quartered
1/2 an english cucumber, chopped, or several Lebanese cukes
1/4 cup pitted black olives, chopped
2 tbsp fresh chives, chopped
1/4 cup lightly packed fresh basil, chopped
4 tbsp white wine vinegar
7 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Boil 3 cups of lightly salted water and add the dry lentils. Cook until they are tender, approximately 15 minutes. Drain and set aside.

In a larger pot of salted water, boil pasta and whole cloves of garlic until the pasta is al dente, approximately 5 minutes. Drain pasta and set garlic aside to cool. You want your garlic to be smushy. If you can't squeeze it out of its skin, then you'll need to boil it for a little longer.
Combine tomatoes, cucumber, herbs, and olives in a large bowl and add cooled pasta and lentils. Uniformity is crucial to make this salad work well, so ensure that all your vegetables are chopped to similar sizes. Using the size of the pieces of pasta is a good guide.

Using a mortar and pestle or some other kind of mashing apparatus, smush the boiled garlic into a paste. Then add vinegar and olive oil. You can season this dressing with salt and pepper if you are feeling brave, or you can wait until the whole salad is mixed and season it to taste then.
Mix the dressing in with all the other ingredients. Season accordingly and chill in the fridge for half an hour or so before serving.
Jamie says the salad serves four, but this makes a LOT, so I would guess it would serve six or so as main and many more as a side dish.

Beet and apple salad
Adapted from Jaime Magazine

There's a full recipe for this in a recent issue of Jamie's magazine that also calls for the inclusion of red cabbage. I left out the cabbage and it's still pretty great. This is my rendition of the salad from memory, but it's incredibly adaptable.

2 beets, raw, peeled and/or scrubbed *up quantities if you need to make more
1-2 Granny Smith apples, depending on your preference
handful of mint leaves or basil leaves finely chopped
juice of half-whole lime
drizzle of olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Scrub your beets and remove root and topper. Depending on how clean they are, and how thick the skin is, you may choose to peel these. Slice them up and cut into matchstick pieces. If you'd rather grate these in the food processor, or by hand, feel free.

Do the same with the apples, minus the peeling step. Drop into a bowl, and scatter over your mint or basil leaves (or you could use a combination). Drizzle over the oil to taste, the lime and seasoning. Mix together with your fingers, which will no doubt be stained pink from your beet chopping.
The apples soon turn pink on account of the beets, but that's part of the charm. This is very good at room temperature, but even better cold from the fridge.

Lentil Vegetable Soup

So here we are in the middle of January. Ugh. Is there another month more trying than the first of the year, with its post-holiday letdown, cold temperatures, dark afternoons and never ending snow? I don't even have a winter holiday planned to keep me going.

But nevermind. I shouldn't complain, especially when a hot bowl of soup does wonders in the lift-the-spirits department. I made this veggie lentil soup a week or so ago, and with half a batch already down my hatch, and the other waiting for me in the freezer, I should have enough bowls to make it to at least February.

This soup comes together pretty quickly, and apart from a bit of chopping, it's easy. Plus, it's got lentils and veggies, which is a pretty healthy combination, which is much needed after the gluttony of Christmas.

(My pitures here are typically shit, but one of my resolutions is to improve them for 2011. Stay tuned to see how that goes.)


Chippity chop up your veggies to get started.
Then they get sauted in a bit of olive oil, along with some garlic.

And then in goes your lentils. These are the lentil du puy. Ohhh, fancy.

And here's the final product. I've made prettier soups for sure, but this is a pretty good, wholesome bowl that you can probably throw together from what's in your cupboard already.

Vegetable Lentil Soup

From Mad Hungry, by Lucinda Scala Quinn

Serves 6 to 8

2 1/2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 onion, chopped (3/4 cup)
2 carrots, peeled and chopped (3/4 cup)
2 celery stalks, peeled and chopped (2/3 cup)
3 garlic cloves, minced (1 tablespoon)
1 tablespoon coarse salt
1 small tomato, chopped (1/3 cup)
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2 cups brown or green lentils
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 small bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
6 cups chicken broth or vegetable broth
4 cups water, plus more if needed
2 teaspoons red wine vinegar
Garlic Croutons, optional

Directions

1.Heat a large soup pot over high heat and swirl in the olive oil. Add the onion, carrots, celery, garlic, and 1 teaspoon of the salt. Reduce the heat to low and saute until the vegetables are lightly caramelized, about 5 minutes. Add the tomato and cook for 2 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste and cook for another 2 minutes.

2.Add the lentils, thyme, bay leaf, pepper, and the remaining 2 teaspoons salt. Add the broth and water, and bring to a boil, skimming and discarding any foam as it rises to the surface. Reduce the heat and simmer until the lentils are tender, 15 to 20 minutes. (The cooking time depends on the age of the dried lentils.) Stir in the vinegar. Season to taste with salt and pepper. If needed, thin the soup with additional water or broth for the desired consistency. Serve in a bowl topped with fresh croutons, if using.

Lentil salad

I made this salad a couple of weeks ago after being inspired by some of the recipes I found in Mark Bittmans, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. (Another Express read from the library!)

The actual recipe here is loosely based on this one, which really is more of a food memory than an actual recipe.

Start buy cooking the lentils (I used Puy) in enough water to cover. I flavoured the liquid with a smashed clove of garlic and some rosemary and thyme. You need to cook them for quite a while. I was impatient and took them off the heat early, but ideally they should simmer for at least 30 minutes, until they're mushy rather than annoyingly al dente, as mine were.

Doesn't this pot look like something out of a Harry Potter movie?

Next, prep some of the veg, which in my case, where freshly shelled new peas.

Dice and cook two pieces of bacon until crispy.

Then add in some chopped carrot to soften, along with some garlic.

Peel and chop one beet. Recipes always say to wear gloves when doing this, but I never find my hands remain stained all that long.

Whip up a little dressing, with some lemon juice, dijon mustard (I only had grainy) and a splash of red wine vinegar. I added only a splash of olive oil, since I was going to incorporate the bacon fat into the finished salad.

And here's what it looks like all assembled, topped with feta cheese. You can see here that I added in the beets (raw) and some asparagus, which I cooked. The salad is very nice warm, where the cheese melts a bit into the lentils, but also keeps very well cold and makes a great lunch.

Lentil salad

1 c. of Puy lentils
2 slices bacon, diced
1 large carrot, diced
1 large beet, peeled and diced
1 clove of garlic, chopped
handful of fresh or frozen peas
8-10 spears of asparagus, steamed and chopped into bite-sized pieces

For the dressing

1 tbsp. dijon mustard
1/4 c. (approx.) lemon juice and red wine vinegar
salt and pepper to taste
splash of olive oil
*dressing is really to taste, and you may need to adjust amounts depending on how dressed you like your salad

1. Begin by cooking the lentils in enough water to cover, flavoured with herbs and garlic of your choosing.

2. Dice bacon and cook in skillet until crispy.

3. When bacon is almost cooked, add in carrot and garlic. Cook until softened.

4. When lentils are cooked and slightly mushy, drain and add to pan with bacon and carrots. Toss in other vegetables and add in dressing. Top with some crumbled feta cheese and enjoy!