Tag Archive for 'mizuna'

Green peach salad with feta

Published
by
marc
on May 24, 2008
in Fruit, Fusion, Salad, Spring, Vegetable and Vegetarian
. 9 Comments

When life gives you green peaches, make a salad!

I’m sure we’ve all jumped the gun on peach season seeing those perfectly fuzzy fragrant bulbs sitting in our grocers produce section just screaming out to be bought. It’s still a bit early in the season for peaches, so if you gave into the calling, you more than likely to end up with crunchy fructose deficient duds. But don’t despair! Green peaches are actually delicious if you know what to do with them.

“What the hell would you do with a green peach, I mean that’s like wilted lettuce isn’t it?”

Technically if you’re hoping for them to ripen in your fruit bowl, you’ll be waiting a long time, since the sugar content of stone fruit does not increase once they are picked. What’s more likely to happen is that they’ll go from hard and dry to soft and mealy.

“So what do you do with them? Load them into a potato canon and shoot them at your neighbor’s dog?”

Well, you could do that, but that’s mean, and a good way to get your ass kicked, not to mention the fact that you’d be wasting a perfectly good peach. What you really have to do is shift your thinking a bit and treat it like a vegetable.

“WTF!?”

Think of it as a fragrant veggie that’s somewhere between crisp and crunchy and refreshingly tart with a mellow aroma. They’re especially good added to salads and make excellent pickles.

“Dude, you’re a genius”

While I’d like to take credit for figuring this one out, I actually got the idea at some restaurant out in Cowra/Canowindra (NSW Australia) or thereabouts. The salad and dressing on the other-hand is a product of some daydreaming (after my anger with Fresh Direct subsided for charging me $4 for apricot sized green peaches).

I know the flavors are from all over the place, but it works. I like the way the intensely earthy sesame oil harmonizes with the barnyard notes of the goat cheese and the floral peachiness coming from the unripe stone fruit. Likewise, the creamy feta offsets the tartness of the green peaches nicely.

So what unconventional ways to rescue an ingredient have you found?
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Almost spring salad with honey roast garlic lemonette

Published
by
marc
on April 6, 2008
in Appetizer, Salad and Vegetable
. 8 Comments

Beet, apple and blue goat cheese salad with honey roast garlic lemonette

I’ve been craving spring for weeks now, but the weather around here has been a tease at best. Yesterday was the first Saturday with the slightest semblance of spring, so I headed up to the Union Square Greenmarket in hopes of finding asparagus, ramps, and maybe even some fiddleheads…

Not surprisingly, I was disappointed with the same old root veggies that the vendors have been hawking all winter, but the sprout vendor seemed to have an unusually large selection of sprouts, and I found a delightful bleu goat cheese. My mind was already assembling the beginnings of a schizophrenic salad, dreaming of a day soon when the stalls will be overflowing with tender green goodness.

Field cress, Miner lettuce, and MizunaSo it’s Sunday, gloomy and cold again. On goes the oven and in go a head of aging garlic I had sitting around, and a couple beets. Meanwhile my mind is being tantalized by the baby greens in the fridge and some bright yellow lemons. Torn between a winter salad and spring salad, I came to a delicious compromise.

A layer of sweet roast beets with a layer of crisp juicy apple topped with some mizuna, cress and miner lettuce that are dressed in a mellow garlic lemonette (lemon+vinaigrette) all topped with some salty barnyardy bleu goat cheese and some crunchy candied walnuts. Wow, that was a mouthful, but so is the flavor of this salad:-)

for roasting
1 beet washed and wrapped in foil
1 head garlic, tops chopped off, drizzled with EVOO and wrapped in foil

for salad
1/2 apple peeled cored and mandolined into “o”s (leave them stuck together to keep them from turning brown)
2 C baby greens (I used mizuna, field cress and miner lettuce)
bleu goat cheese
candied walnuts
fresh ground black pepper

for dressing
1 clove roast garlic mashed
1 Tbs lemon juice
1 Tbs EVOO (extra virgin olive oil)
1/4 tsp honey
1/4 tsp kosher salt (add a little more if you feel it needs it)
fresh ground black pepper

Put the foil wrapped beet(s) and garlic on a baking sheet in a 375 degree oven. The garlic will be done in about 35 minutes, but the beets will need at least an hour (or until you can stick a knife all the way through).

Whisk all the dressing ingredients together. Peel the beet and slice into 1/8″ thick slices. Dress the beets with enough dressing to coat.

To assemble the salad, just put down 3 pieces of beet on a plate, put 1 or 2 slices of apple on top. Lightly dress the greens with some of the dressing (you won’t need it all), and place a handful of greens on top of the beets and apple. Top with some crumbled bleu goat cheese, candied walnuts and some fresh ground pepper.

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