Bone Appetite

Recipe: Quickest Chickpea and Parsley Salad, Ever

Time for more Garbanzo journalism!

This is insanely quick - 2 minutes start to finish if you have the ingredients on hand - and a really fresh and nutritious salad.

1 can chickpeas, rinsed out in a colander
1 cup of fresh parsley, finely chopped
juice of 1 lemon
about a tablespoon of EVO
1 teaspoon soy sauce
salt and fresh-ground pepper to taste (don't be shy with the salt here, though; a 1/4 teaspoon seems about right)

Toss and serve. May also be chilled to good effect. Serves about four as a side.

I've tried adding in "bonus" ingredients here -- a little roasted red pepper, split cherry tomatoes, etc. -- which are fine, but less somehow seems to be more here.

Recipe: Cold Green Bean and Leek Salad

I had a bunch of leeks to use up, and I realized that on Sunday -- cooking for five adults and two children -- I had a somewhat thin menu for company, but I also wanted to cook ahead. (The rest of the menu was grilled tritip - which I sadly, hideously overcooked, but that's a story for another day -- sweet potato fries and a simple green salad with vinaigrette.) I looked around on the net, found some green bean and leek and potato salads, and a couple of hot bean and leek dishes, but nothing quite like what I had in mind, so I riffed.

This is what I came up with (sorry, no photo, I forgot!):

1 pound green beans, trimmed and cut into thirds
5 leeks, white parts only, sliced into thin rounds
3 cloves of garlic, pressed
2 tablespoons EVO
2 tablespoons sun dried tomato paste (I would have used sun dried tomatoes, but was out)
2 tablespoons pine nuts
1/2 cup curly parsley, finely chopped

Steam the green beans lightly and then dunk them in cold water. Drain.

In a small skillet, in heated EVO, over medium heat, saute the garlic with the leeks until the leeks are cooked and floppy but not to the point of limpness (3-5 minutes, I'd say). Then mix in the sun dried tomato paste and remove from the heat to a bowl.

In a small skillet, brown the pine nuts over high heat, moving constantly. (You can do this first if you want to use the same skillet for the leeks, but do this is in a DRY skillet, no oil or anything.) Don't burn the poor things.

Combine the beans, leeks, pine nuts, and parsley, and toss until everything is mixed and thoroughly coated. Chill in the fridge for at least 20 minutes.

I got about five medium-sized portions out of this recipe; to make it into a main dish for four, I'd double the ingredients.

The flavor of the leeks comes through nicely without overwhelming the beans, and there's a rich taste joining the flavors together from the garlic and nuts and sun dried tomatoes; the parsley adds a fresh accent to the combination. A fairly successful experiment.

Recipe: Medley of Cold Squash Salad Recipes

No, the title is not a typo.

I had originally planned on doing a green salad tonight, but because I didn't use the summer squash last night, and I made focaccia for the main course tonight, my thoughts turned to cold squash salad. I was originally thinking a little EVO, lime juice, tarragon, maybe a little salt and pepper, over steamed and doused squash, chill in the fridge, pop it out when dinner's ready.

But, this thing called the Internet, it lets you check your thinking against the wisdom of the masses. When I had typed the appropriate search terms into the Google, this is the recipe that I found.

Now, as I'm sure we're all well aware by now, anything you find on the Intertubes must be taken with a huge grain of salt. Recipes would seem to be particularly risky with respect to attribution and provenance; there's hardly a real original recipe in the world, I would think, except insofar as we're all riffing on one another. (Maybe the Soylent Green Cookbook will be an original. GMOs, anyone? The GMO Cookbook! Now that's an idea waiting for an author!)

So, I looked at this particular recipe and I thought, why not? I've actually got an avocado unspoken for unhand and ripe, and yes, I have...cream cheese? Hmmm. What's up with that? And...green chiles? And olives are not listed in the ingredient list, but they are in the directions.

And that cream cheese -- a 3 ounce package? I've never seen cream cheese in 3-ounce packages. Cut into 3/4" cubes? 3 ounces of cream cheese would make, well, about four such cubes. And while I confess that I frequently pop cheese to be grated or cut into the freezer for ten minutes to harden it up and make the cutting process easier, trust me, this does not work with cream cheese. Who cuts cream cheese into cubes, and gets cubes when they're done? (Our cream cheese comes in a circular tub, making cutting it all the more problematic.) And...you figure out how much 3 ounces of cream cheese is. I guessed, using the pizza-cutting part of my brain.

All this makes me a little suspicious. That perhaps this recipe was modified, either by the website editor, the contributor, or wherever. Because, well, if olives were in the original recipe, but not the green chiles, and the cream cheese were feta, this would make a pretty decent Greek salad, particularly if part or all of the squash were cucumbers.

I cast no aspersions on Helen Rodriguez or InMamasKitchen.com here -- that's what we all do when we innovate or try to be creative with recipes. You take an existing idea, you monkey with it, it's either a success or it isn't and you can claim it as your own or orphan it. A little careful editing and kitchen-testing would help, though.

In my case, I couldn't make it quite as instructed. I substituted a shallot for the scallions, I skipped the green chiles and used olives (5, to be precise, because that seemed like the right number), I added a quarter of a roasted red pepper diced up, and I just tried not to smoosh the cream cheese entirely (I would've used feta had I any on hand).

This was not bad -- but I think it would've been better with the feta, and a bit more lemon juice. Mika says she likes it very much, complex flavors without anything really dominating and a nice mix of textures.

Now, would that be enough for an original recipe?