From the category archives:

Salads & dressings

Summer Fest Week 4 – Tomato Salad

August 18, 2009

Tomatoes are a paradoxical plant. Botanically, they’re a fruit — they have their seeds on the inside — but in the kitchen we treat them as vegetables. While their flesh is a staple in many world cuisines, their leaves are toxic enough to poison a small child. Heck, we can’t even agree on how to [...]

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Strawberry and Spinach Salad

May 11, 2009

This isn’t the most original recipe in the world. Variations with poppyseeds and a sickly sweet dressing have been gracing the pages of women’s magazines for decades. But when Mom says she wants a spinach salad for Mother’s Day, Mom gets a spinach salad. And when she requests my raspberry vinaigrette, she gets that too.
Now, [...]

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Homemade Ranch Dressing

March 31, 2009

I haven’t bought bottled salad dressing in years. Not only is homemade vinaigrette quick and easy to make, it tastes so much better than the store bought versions, I no longer even bother to look at the dressing aisle. While I enjoy playing with different oils, vinegars and herbs, I started making my own dressing [...]

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Bean Salad

March 24, 2009

For the record, I did very little complaining about winter this year. This is especially noteworthy given the vast amounts of snow and sub-zero temperatures we endured, not to mention the time I had to climb onto the roof and chisel ice out of the satellite dish with the car’s windshield scraper.
I figure this gives [...]

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Empire Apple Cider Vinegar

March 4, 2009

The little things give us away. We go quietly about minding our own business, then someone catches a detail and knows something about you. When I was backpacking in Europe I spotted fellow Canucks by their iron engineering rings or Mountain Equipment Co-op jackets. Americans peg me by my pasty skin and they way I [...]

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Lemon-Loaded North African Dressing

May 16, 2008

These days when you order a salad, the dressings choices are so varied they could have their own menu. But years ago, when I fell in love with this lemon-loaded version, the only competition was — and had been for decades — Italian, French, Thousand Island and blue cheese. Period.
You had to go to ethnic [...]

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Roasted Pepper Salad

May 14, 2008

This salad takes almost as long to say as it does to prepare. The full name of this dish is — deep breath — Roasted Sweet Pepper Salad with Pine Nuts, Goat Cheese and Basil. Phew! That’s practically the whole recipe.
Another of Rose Reisman’s gems from The Complete Light Kitchen, this takes all of 10 [...]

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Blast from The Past Cranberry Salad

September 5, 2006

Despite my tour of the Jell-O Museum in LeRoy, NY, I’ve never been partial to the dessert. While the 50s had a love affair with jellied anything — from tuna salad set in lemon gelatin to tomato aspic — I was born a decade too late to be acclimatized to this particular culinary craze. Once [...]

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Six Degrees of Separation Black Bean Salad

May 31, 2006

Cilantro is one of those herbs that you either love or hate. My best friend says it tastes like soap, which it doesn’t — and believe me, I should know (see my post on Turkish Delight). While I could eat it by the handful and can’t imagine a bowl of Thai green curry without it, [...]