walnuts – The Kitchen Illiterate

Classic Curried Chicken Salad

This week Sean is out of town, and I am eating like a total single lady. By that I mean on the couch, surrounded by magazines and watching How I Met Your Mother. By that I also mean I’m eating super easy salads, for which most of the prep work was done Sunday night. This Curried Chicken Salad is a perfect example a of single lady dinner. It took me about 15 minutes to throw together, it’s simple and summery, and its served in endive leaves, for goodness sake.

I love Curried Chicken Salad because it is totally classic, but still a little unexpected. It’s easy, but seems kind of decadent. It can be varied in endless ways, or kept simple and basic. I had originally intended to eat this chicken salad wrapped in lettuce leaves, but I couldn’t find any with that good cup shape. However, the endive was perfect: It added just the right amount of bitter crunch. This salad is also great wrapped in a soft whole wheat or green spinach-y tortilla.
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Persian Chicken Stew

It is no secret that I’ve been at a real standstill in the kitchen lately. It isn’t just culinary inspiration that’s been lacking, but the writerly inspiration, too. Even when I do cook something fantastic, I can’t seem to find anything interesting to say about it. For example, this stew. It’s great. It’s full of unique flavors, and I got to use some new ingredients, and I found all kinds of delicious things to do with the leftovers. And I’ve been trying now for weeks to sit down and say something that would make you all want to rush into your kitchens to get cooking. How am I doing?
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From the farm: Pea Shoot Pesto

I got my first box from West End Farm this week, which was very exciting. It was full of green things, many of them unknown to me, but thanks to the handy dandy newsletter, they were quickly identified. Tis the season, apparently, for pea shoots and baby greens and spinach and lettuce and teeny, tiny radishes, not to mention wonderful smelling mint and green onions. And all of it looked so unbelievably fresh and lovely. And green. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do with all of those greens, but the newsletter recommended making pesto with the tiny, delicate pea shoots, and I figured it was high time I get over my fear of making pesto and give it a shot.
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Broccoli and Dill Wild Rice

I think dill is my new favorite herb, thanks to this bowl of rice and broccoli. When I started pulling things out of the refrigerator to make lunch, I had no idea I was going to love what came out of the pot in the end as much as I did. And it’s all because of the dill. Well, and the walnuts didn’t hurt. And I always love broccoli. And Worcestershire sauce adds a great kick to wild rice. So really, this was just the perfect combination of ingredients.
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Brussels Sprout and Brown Rice Salad

This might not look like the most appetizing meal you’ve ever seen, but I have to tell you, it is so tasty and satisfying it has become a very regular dinner in my little house. I’ve tried a few variations of this recipe, and have concluded that this one is the best: the crunchy walnuts and thinly sliced Brussels are very well accented by the earthiness of za’atar, a blend of sumac, sesame seeds, and other dried herbs. I was introduced to za’atar by an old college friend, whose father is Lebanese, but until now hadn’t found much use for it other than making the flatbread her father would bring up when he visited.

My brother, Patrick, inspired this concoction when he mentioned that he had started cooking Brussels sprouts sliced very thinly. They cook a lot faster, and have a little more delicate flavor. And why, you might be wondering is this dish so very yellow? I decided to cook the rice with turmeric, a little suggestion from a former housemate, Christa. So this is dish is like a big amalgam of inspiration from people I’ve known, and a quick and easy weeknight dinner full of crunch and flavor.
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Caramel Walnut Buche de Noel

When I was in high school I was a bit of a Francophile. Ok, I was a lot of a Francophile. I took French throughout high school, and most years our teacher would bring a buche de noel to share before our winter break. One year we even got to take over the home ec room and make one. I loved them and every year I think of making one again, but I never have. This year, for our library’s holiday party, our lovely admin asked me to bring a dessert. I poured over cookbooks and holiday cooking magazines before it hit me: Of course I had to make a buche de noel!
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Cookie Time: Mexican Wedding Cakes

Oh yes. It is time for Holiday Cookies, and for me, that always means at least one batch of my all time favorites: Mexican Wedding Cakes. Or Russian Tea Cakes. Or Kourambethes Greek Cookies. Whatever you call them, they are wonderful: buttery, sweet, nutty bites of awesome. And they’re pretty easy to make. These have been my favorite cookies for a long, long time, and when I first moved out on my own and had a Christmas alone in Boston, these were the cookies I knew I would have to make to alleviate at least a little bit of the sadness of being way from my family. My mom emailed her recipes, and I still have the print out, complete with butter smudges, stuffed into my recipe folder.
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Rustic Walnut Bread

For someone who bakes her own bread pretty regularly, I haven’t experimented too much with different types of bread. I usually only eat bread once a day, for breakfast, with peanut butter, so I tended to think that my options were limited to plain sourdough or wheat. But I recently read a book by Joyce Carol Oates in which the main character begins learning how to bake bread. And she bakes all kinds of different loaves, full of fruits and nuts and flavors, and I was smitten. I decided it was time to branch out, to move away from sourdough and try something new. And I just happened to open one of my bread cookbooks to a recipe for Rustic Walnut Bread, and my decision was made.
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