No Fuss Veggie Sorbet

How many times has this happened to you?  You are sitting on the settee in lounging pajamas reading Photoplay and eating bonbons when the hubby calls and says he is bringing home the boss for dinner.  What's a girl to do?   Come on, that never happens unless you watch reruns of I Love Lucy.

But what if you do need a quick and easy dish for company?  Here's our newest favorite.

Let me begin by saying, I love a long complicated recipe.  Two days, three days, I once attempted a glacé fruit recipe that took 8 days.  Don't ask!  

If a recipe calls for some new piece of kitchen paraphernalia, I am all in.  But sometimes, a classy no-brainer is a great thing.   So here is a quick and easy recipe that involves no cooking and will make you a culinary star. 

This is a sorbet that you can use as an appetizer, a salad, a palate cleanser, or dessert, depending o on how you dress it up.  I like it best as a salad, it is after all, veggies, and its much more fun than that bag of chopped radicchio.

Lucinda's Salad Sorbet

1 bottle Naked Berry Veggie juice
1 ice cream maker

Pour juice in ice cream maker.  Process about 25 minutes.  Place in a container in the freezer till ready to use.

Plain is fine, but for a salad course, try serving it with a few vegetable chips, some candied carrots or beets, or some pickled blueberries or grapes.

Not to mention there are tons, tons of fruit concoctions out there just dying to make and appearance on your table.  Kale Blazer is my next fave sorbet.   Think about it a bowl or raw, chopped kale or wine glass of kale sorbet?  

As a dessert add some macerated berries with a bit of sugar to boost the sweetness.  

Go on, use your imagination and be sure to send photos!

White Fruit Salad

I admit to a rather unhealthy adoration of white food.  Grits, rice, potatoes -- yes I know the more colorful one's diet the healthier one will be.  I have heard it and ignored it.

Recently, I was cooking a leg of lamb.  My side dish was to be scalloped potatoes.  I wanted something colorful and acidic to cut through the richness of the meat and potatoes.   Someone suggested a fruit salad, and I thought a nice colorful mix of plums, peaches, berries, and herbs with a tangy vinaigrette would do the trick.

"Pick some nice fruit for the salad," I said on the phone.  I dug into the bag of fruit when my guests arrived.  The was an apple. An Asian pear.  Two mushy Bartlett pears.  A small watermelon.  A cantaloupe that felt full and ripe, but when cut into was a gelatinous slime.   I will admit that I missed the blueberries and blackberries that got tucked into the fridge without my knowledge.   My guests were used to the plastic cups labeled "fruit salad" at the high end grocery that contain chunks of melon, a few berries and maybe a chunk of pineapple.

I set about making a white fruit salad, and found a green veggie to serve with the lamb.   When I set the fruit salad on the table there was an uproar.  It did not look like any fruit salad they had ever eaten.  It was all white with some cucumber in it and a revolt was at hand.  Then they ate it.  It was delicious, even though it was white and there were no chunks of watermelon.

White Fruit Salad

1 Asian pear
2 Bartlet pears
1 apple
1 small English cucumber
1 bunch of cilantro, chopped
1 lime, juiced
Pinch of salt

Peal the pears and apple and cut into a small dice.  Do the same with the English cucumber.  Sprinkle with the lime juice and salt.   Toss in the cilantro.

Dressing

1 lime, juiced
2 tablespoons Greek yogurt
1 tablespoon fruity vinegar


Mix together in a small bowl and toss into the fruit salad.

Remember, it is your fruit salad... if you don't like cilantro add parsley.  Lemon work as do limes.  Cider or champagne vinegar will work,as will a white balsamic.  Use mayonnaise instead of yogurt if you so choose.  When dressing the salad, however, less is more.   You want the fruit to be gently assisted by the dressing and not drowned.


Some guests might just balk at white fruit salad, but give them a minute.  There was about a tablespoon left in the bowl and put it into the chicken's snack.  Someone yelled from the other room, "You're not throwing that away?"  Don't worry, we'll make more.

Farro with Beets and Blueberries

I made a farro salad this weekend. I made it two ways, a composed warm salad and jumbled cold salad. They both worked fine. In fact, it is rather nice to try it both ways. The composed salad is small and makes for a great appetizer and when you are finished you can just dump the leftovers into a bowl and set it in the fridge for the next day.

Everyone seems to have his or her own special way to make farro. Some people cook it like beans, rinsing and soaking. Some people cook it the way the French often like to cook rice with the grain in a big vat of water, cooking and then draining.

I tend to make it like rice with a ratio of 1 part farro to 2 1/2 parts water.

I used baby beets from my garden, peeling them and sautéing them, which left them with a nice, slightly firm texture. If you use large beets, you might want to roast the beets.



Farro with Beets and Blueberries

1-cup farro
2 1/2 cups water
5 or 6 small young beets with beet green tops
1-tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1/4-cup blueberries
Oil to sauté beets and greens
Salt & pepper to taste
Goat cheese

1. Add the farro and water to a small saucepan, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cook 20 minutes.

2. Cut off beet greens, remove stems, roughly chop or tear and reserve.

3. Peel and cut the beets into 1/4-inch dice. (The beets will stain your hands, so you might want to wear gloves.)

4. Cut about 1/4 cup of the beet stems add to the cubed beets and sauté in a medium skillet with a little oil, until just tender, about 10 minutes.

5. Add the balsamic vinegar and cook another minute.

6. Add blueberries and cook another minute.

7. Remove the beets and blueberry mixture and set aside.

8. In the same skillet, sauté the beet greens until wilted, about 5 minutes.

9. Toss the farro and beet mixture together, and season to taste.

10. Pack into a ring mold about 3/4 full; then add the sautéed beet greens and top with a piece of goat cheese.

11. Unmold and serve.

I like to eat this composed salad warm.




Then I take the leftover farro, beets and greens and toss them together and refrigerate. When I am ready to serve, I give it a toss and add in the goat cheese.

Warm or cold, prissy or tossed, this offers several options with a single recipe.

David Tanis' Bean Salad

I have been without a refrigerator for 3 weeks. Actually, I own the refrigerator, I just don't have it in my possession, but that is a long and ugly story. I recently watched a docudramatization of what the world would be like after the apocalypse. We would basically be screwed. Not counting the marauding gangs of hungry children that would kill you for a root vegetable (according to this program gangs of vicious children would be about the worst thing after the apocalypse), there would be the general problem of what to do without television to watch docudramatizations. For that matter, what would we do without electricity or the refrigerator that is run by electricity. Which brings me to my recent dilemma of not having a refrigerator and realizing, quite dramatically, what I use the refrigerator for every day.

There has been a lot of eating out of the garden. Recently at Cookbook Of The Day, I wrote about David Tanis' Heart of the Artichoke. I love Tanis because he really loves the "food" that food is made of and not just the allure of being a chef. He works at Chez Panisse, so that might just have something to do with his approach. I had seen a recipe for Green Bean Salad with Pickled Shallots. I had also left the cookbook on my desk, so I wasn't sure of the exact recipe, but I knew that having seen his recipe, I could replicate it even without his book. Here is the recipe:

Green Bean Salad with Pickled Shallots

3 large shallots
Salt and Pepper
3 tablespoons sherry vinegar
2 pounds small green beans, topped and tailed
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon finely slivered chives

Peel the shallots and slice crosswise. Put them in a small bowl, season well with salt and pepper, add the vinegar. let sit for a half hour.

Boil the green beans in a large pot of salted water for 3 to 5 minutes, until just past the crunchy. Spread them out to cool. Just before you serve the salad, put the green beans in a bowl and season well with salt and pepper. Whisk the olive oil into the shallots and vinegar, then add the dressed shallots to the beans. Toss well, transfer to a platter or serving bowl, and sprinkle with chives.

In that great cooking tradition: I had no green beans, only yellow beans. I had no shallots, only fresh onions. I had no sherry vinegar, but I did have white balsamic. I had chives but I used parsley. Oh yes, and I had no refrigerator! I didn't "tail" my beans. That is a very American thing to do. The French just leave them and I am more inclined to do that, especially since I grew the beans. Here is my:

Yellow Bean Salad with Pickled Onions.

tails and all.

Whole Potato Salad

In preparation for Easter guests, I was working on a menu. I bought some beautiful long beef ribs to slowly braise. I wanted a potato salad to serve with them, but given the substantial ribs I wanted a substantial potato salad. Quail eggs are one of my favorite ingredients and when I looked at them, I thought they would be nice whole in a salad. I decided on a traditional potato salad using whole ingredients.




I bought some baby potatoes and some pearl onions. I felt leaving the onion raw would make them too strong for this preparation, so I pickled the onions for 24 hours. A nice serving is about three or four small potatoes for each onion and quail egg.

I like celery in my potato salad, but I didn't want chunks of celery to detract from my whole ingredients so I finely chopped the celery to add to mayonnaise and a touch of mustard. Unfortunately, I forgot (or just failed to pay attention) to the amount of liquid given off by the chopped celery. When I put it in the mayonnaise, it made the sauce too watery and I was forced to start over!!

After assembling the salad, I found that the individual ingredients got a bit lost and I thought I would try plating the celery/mayo as a real "sauce" and placing the individual ingredients on top of the sauce so they were pronounced.



In this picture the potatoes appear to be baking russets, but I assure you they are not quite as big as they look. They are sitting on a tiny cup saucer and not a dinner plate. This plating, however, does allow one to use slightly larger potatoes which can be cut on a plate. (I suppose that had I plated it on long narrow plates I would have swished the sauce in a boldly abstract form and placed the whole item in order of size, clearly I have watched one too many Top Chef episodes.)

In the end, I decided to leave it mix into a nice bowl.



Per serving I use the following as a rule of thumb. A lot of it will depend on the size of the potatoes. Size does matter! 3 to 4 new or small potatoes; 1 quail egg; 1 pickled onion.

Whole Potato Salad

6 pearl onions
1/2 cup vinegar
24 small whole potatoes
6 quail eggs
2 stalks celery
3/4 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon mustard
salt and pepper to taste


Peel and trim the onions. In a small air-tight container or small jar, submerge the onions in the vinegar and leave in the refrigerator overnight.

In a saucepan, cover the whole potatoes, bring to a boil and cook till tender, about 10 minutes. allow to cool.

In another pan, cover the quail eggs with water and bring to a boil. Boil one minute and submerge in cold water. Peel the eggs. (There is no easy way to peel quail eggs!)

Finely chop the celery and drain on a paper towel to remove the excess moisture. Add the celery to the mayonnaise and mustard and stir till smooth.

Drain the pickled onions and add the onions, potatoes and eggs to the sauce. Salt and pepper to taste.

As they say on Top Chef: Got Big or Go Home!

Hamburger Salad

I love hamburgers, but I hate those big slabs of tomato or onion that one often finds slapped on the top. So when I make hamburgers, I like to make a little salad to top it off.

Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Hamburger Salad

1 small head of iceberg lettuce, finely chopped
1 tomato, chopped
1 red onion, chopped
4 slices of bacon, fried crisp and crumbled
1/4 cup of mayonnaise

Mix the above ingredients in a small bowl. Top off your burger.

I admit, it is a little messy, but not as messy as when that big ol' hunk of tomato slide off the burger into your hand. Give it a try. You will be a convert!