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?