Beetroot Rhubarb-Kimchi Salad

Invite me to your sunny picnic, this is what I’ll make to bring!  Fresh and spicy, sweet and sour, savoury, crunchy, moreish, yum!

You all know I would never be strictly prescriptive in these salads that combine fermented elements with fresh fruit and vegetables. This one is simply

• grated beetroot,
• chopped apples,
• a few tablespoons  of  Rhubarb Kimchi, pureed, mixed in with:
• a vinaigrette of olive oil and orange juice
• dash of toasted sesame oil
• a sprinkle of toasted pecans

Add anything else– goats cheese, feta, other nuts and seeds, carrots, fennel, cabbage, herbs, wild greens, lettuces or leaves….  Whatevah!

You can always use cabbage kimchi in salad dressings too.

The rhubarb kimchi, pureed, is also a wonderful salsa / raw chutney with goat’s cheese and crackers.

And of course, scraps from the beetroot, apple, and orange, and a new stalk of rhubarb from the raised bed in the garden, make a wonderful kvass!  And nothing’s been wasted.

Hearty Salads from Bits and Pieces

LEFTOVERS; FERMENTS; RESISTANT STARCH; GREAT SALADS

Yesterday I made this delicious Moroccan tomato salad inspired by a recipe in Paula Wolfert’s The Food of Morocco.  It’s a great late summer/ early autumn dish, with tomatoes and grilled peppers and onions in a lemony (in fact preserved-lemony) vinaigrette, spiced with paprika and cumin.

But we didn’t finish it in one meal.

Fairfood International and the Moroccan Tomato Industry

Fairfood International and a Moroccan Tomato Salad

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Fairfood International is an Amsterdam-based organisation that campaigns “to improve the socio-economic conditions of vulnerable people in our food system, such as smallholder farmers, workers (especially women) and consumers, and to ensure the sustainable production and consumption of food,” as they explain on their website.  You can learn a lot on their site about global commodity foods and workers’ lives in industries like pineapples from the Philippines, Shrimp from Asia, Vanilla from Madagascar and Central American Sugarcane.

I’ve been impressed with their efforts against poor working conditions, low wages, job insecurity, and pesticide exposure among people working in the really huge tomato industry in Morocco.

Green Goddess Dip and Dressings: Fermenting Classics

After that success of a dip with the fermented gooseberries, I began to ponder party dips and the social and gustatory joys of standing, chatting and especially gesturing with crudités of carrot and celery decorated in blobs of creamy green.

I’d remembered the pleasure in the days of yore eating dips made from packets of dried onion soup mixed with sour cream, and others in a Green Goddess family in which herbs like parsley, dill, even tarragon, are mixed with garlic and chives and sour cream, and often mayonnaise or an egg yolk too (to emulsify), and perhaps anchovies, for a little secret umami.

And there saying hello on my kitchen counter were the herbs I began to ferment nearly two months ago according to traditions of Ukraine and France and most certainly other places as well.

So I made Green Goddess Dip with:

Preserved Lemons: Dressings and Drinks

Fermented Preserved Lemons: delicious in dressings; refreshing in drinks. Tart, salty, bitter, tangy, matured in lemon juice and sea salt, Preserved Lemons are a great larder item for the lacto-fermenting cook.  I made a batch several months ago, and they’ve really come into their own. I’ve been playing with them a bit, and getting obsessed with their bold brightness– or is it a bright boldness?–how they refuse to be denied presence, they refuse not to shine.

Salad Dressing with Kimchi: Inspirations from A Girl and Her Greens

I requested a review copy of April Bloomfield’s A Girl and Her Greens: Hearty Meals from the Garden as I’ve been so curious about the foodie buzz surrounding her.  Now I get why she’s such a star.

 

April Bloomfield, in her writing and recipes, straddles something exciting between home cooking and cheffy imagination and technique, and it all feels accessible and inspiring.  Her approach is relaxed and easy as she looks around the world for culinary ideas and somehow simultaneously simplifies and elevates the foods.  It’s a kind of magic! Yet she never presents herself as the final word.

Waldorf Salad with a Kefir Dressing

This is for my friend who asked for recipes that I might imagine too simple and obvious: an easy Waldorf Salad variation if you are empowering your digestive microbiota with fermented foods in as many dishes as possible.

Auld Lang Syne Salad

I’m a Black Eyed Peas-at-New Years gal, and this year I searched around and could only find a tin. So a tin of peas it is, and a most wonderful salad that that feels lemony and green and bright.  I know that these peas can take a LOT of flavour, and years of preparing them THIS way pushed me towards the fermented flavours and the bitter of the lemon zest.  This is the salad I just made– I’m sure your variations will be delicious too.

Make sure to read this great piece by Michael Twitty musing historically on black eyed peas and greens…