lettuce – The Kitchen Illiterate

Field Fresh Chopped Salad with Chicken

I’ve always loved the idea of eating a great big luscious crunchy salad for dinner. But I’ve never been very good at coming up with creative ideas for main dish salads. I tend to get stuck at lettuce and carrots. And my basic vinaigrette is great, but it can get a bit monotonous. But there is a prepared salad from Trader Joe’s that I love: the Field Fresh Chopped Salad. It’s sweet and savory and fresh and crunchy, and I got in the habit of buying it for solitary dinners and occasional lunches. Then I looked at the ingredients. The poor chicken in this salad is full of so many preservatives, and I know the vegetables could be fresher and more full of flavor. So I decided to make this salad myself.
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Fig and Herb Salad (and a juice cleanse verdict)

I finished my BluePrint Cleanse juice cleanse last Saturday, and the verdict is: totally worth it. I felt terrific: focused, calm, happy. At no point did I feel hungry, deprived, fatigued, or even cranky. The juice was super tasty, although I have to say, after three days I was ready for some new flavors. I couldn’t wait to get in my kitchen and cook some food again.

The timing of the cleanse was kind of perfect: I finished it up the day after my cast came off, so I was doubly ready to cook, to mess about with all the glorious produce we get from our CSA each week and experiment. It was the best feeling. There are a few things the cleanse experience made me realize: 1) I didn’t really know until after I finished that what it had largely been about for me was self-discipline. I needed something to bring me back into control, after a month of feeling very much that things were out of my control. 2) I love love love food. I think about food and cooking a lot. I read about food and cooking a lot. Food is kind of my life. 3) I eat a lot when I’m bored. Who doesn’t? But it’s not a great habit.
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Grilled Salmon and Potato Salad

Last summer, when I packed up my stuff in Boston and moved it all out to Walla Walla, I brought along the mystery grill. The grill showed up a few years back, on a rainy Fourth of July, but for whatever reason was never even unpacked from the box. It first saw the light of day in Walla Walla, when I used it to cook the first meal I made in my new house. I intended to use it often last summer, but instead, I found myself intimidated by it, and uninterested in spending the time and energy required to start a fire when I was cooking for myself alone.

The grill is a tiny thing, a little Smokey Joe. And last week I decided to get over my fear of fire-starting, pull it out of the shed, and give it back its rightful place on my porch. And despite the freezer full of beef waiting to be eaten, I once again decided to cook some salmon on my little grill.
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Wild Rice Salad with Peppers and Carrots

I spent the first 10 days of July back in Boston, the land of steamy air, unexpected thunderstorms, sticky skin, and at least for me on this vacation, no cooking. We ate nearly all of our meals in restaurants or at friends’ houses, and while it was certainly a treat (Indian food! My favorite pasta at Delfino! Pizza!) it was awfully nice to get back into my kitchen last night. It’s been pretty hot here in Walla Walla, although the lack of humidity is a vast improvement on the Northeast right now. Still, I wasn’t feeling a strong inclination to stand over a stove for too long, or eat anything too hot. And I felt a pretty desperate need for vegetables after all that pizza and pasta and grilled meat in Boston.

This Wild Rice salad is perfect for that kind of evening, and is even better the next day, straight out of the fridge cold, when all the flavors have had a chance to get better acquainted. It does involve a fair amount of vegetable chopping, and unless you think to cook the rice ahead of time, there is some stove time required, too, but it’s nice, hands-off stove time, for the most part. And the mix of cooked and uncooked ingredients is surprising and lends some good variety to this salad.
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