making food simpler
When you just don’t know what to make for dinner, head out to your local greenmarket. Farms are producing at their peak in much of the country right now and all that bounty is just waiting for you to bring it home.
Cucumber salad is easy to make and to vary and can even help keep us cool. Cucumbers are plentiful from mid-summer into the fall and have enough crunch and body to be the star ingredient in a main course or side salad. Since they are mostly water, they are refreshing to eat, especially in summer. Like zucchini, cukes can grow large quickly and become too seedy to be tasty. Try to buy slimmer, smaller cucumbers – they may have less seeds and more crispy flesh. If you end up with a giant cuke, just scoop out the seeds.
Solo cucumbers with a vinaigrette make a refreshing lunch or dinner salad but for a little more interest, add herbs. Dill combines deliciously with cukes, as does mint or basil. (I am not a tarragon fan but if you like it, it also works). All kinds of vinaigrettes dress cucumbers well from a simple oil and vinegar to a citrus, berry or mustard base. You could even go all out and use a yogurt, ranch or blue cheese dressing – the cukes can handle it. The most striking presentation of cucumber salad I ever saw was at our favorite ramen restaurant, Ippudo. There they overlap cucumber slices down a long rectangular plate and drizzle with a spicy chili dressing. So simple but appealing and tasty!
Many vegetables pair well with cucumbers including peppers of all colors both sweet and spicy, radishes, jicama, carrots, red onions and lettuce. Some fruits are especially good with cukes, including citrus, tomatoes, avocado, plums and berries. One of my all time favorite salads combines cucumbers with pineapple, mint and lime juice – a simple but surprisingly delicious variation.
The most basic cucumber salad can be fortified to become a main course salad with cooked chicken, shrimp, ham or bacon, toasted walnuts, seeds or pistachios. You might serve a plain, dressed cucumber salad alongside almost anything – fish, chicken, smoked salmon or avocado toast. It makes a tasty sandwich, especially with the addition of a slice or two of cheese, green apple and walnuts, and packs well for a picnic.
I admit there are hot nights when all I do is cut up some cucumbers into spears or rounds and call it a side salad. But if slicing, dicing or spiralizing a few cukes and tossing with herbs and dressing is not too much work, you will be rewarded with a pretty, cooling and satisfying salad.
Cooking has finally become a choice. There is so much prepared food available that we can simply buy or order meals instead cooking. Sometimes that is fine. In fact, sometimes it is the solution. Fish sticks and potato puffs with a bag of frozen vegetables, pizza or Chinese to-go can make a busy week so much easier. But eating that way often gets tired and boring. And too much of it, with too much salt and flour and bad oil and sugar, can leave us feeling lousy both emotionally and physically.
In the New York Times this week, Sam Sifton wrote about cooking something rather than ordering in as a way to feel a little happier. I am with him. I am all for occasional take out meals and understand the need to grab and go from time to time. But, as Sifton points out, “whatever you put together will be palliative”. The smallest effort of making an omelet or sautéing some vegetables or smashing some avocado into a basic guacamole will be more meditative and healthier than anything you could pick up pre-made. You and the people you cook for will feel the love.
Historically, cooking took lots of time. It still can. But we can choose to cook more simply and efficiently and still come up with satisfying and nourishing meals. We can even use some convenience food as a base to make preparing a meal easier. Sometimes just thinking of what to make is the obstacle to cooking. It is summer and you probably don’t want to turn on your oven. Below are some of my go-to, easy to prepare hot weather suppers. You know them so this list is just meant as a reminder. If you have a grill, fire it up! If you stock a few canned (or glassed) things, eggs, seeds and nuts, you will always have meal fixings. Just add some fresh vegetables and you’ll have food on the table in minutes. Just make that small effort. You’ll feel better.
EASY PEASY MEALS
A gin & tonic may be the quintessential summer drink but much depends not only on the gin but on the tonic you use. There are many more choices out there now than the old Schweppes, Seagrams or Canada Dry and the good news is that many are made with high quality ingredients, no sodium benzoate as a preservative, saccharin or high fructose corn syrup. The new fangled versions are not your grandparents’ tonic water – these are specialty drinks that are worthy of mixing with your artisanal or small batch gin or vodka. In summer, I often drink an Aperol Spritz as a cocktail. But if I don’t feel like ordering alcohol, I often opt for tonic water so I am happy there are some flavorful, less sugary options.
Originally developed to prevent malaria, tonic was made from quinine (from tree bark) dissolved in bubbly water. It became a mixer for gin (made palatable by the addition of sugar and lime), drunk by British officers stationed in colonial India. The problem with most commercial tonic water now is the high sugar content which makes it just another sweet soda. Some of the newer tonics have less sugar, like the Fever-tree Naturally light Tonic, which uses fructose (fruit sugar but still sugar) and Q, which has a very low sugar content and uses agave instead of actual sugar. None are completely unsweetened. The addition of freshly sliced lime and a little squeeze of fresh lime juice or a slice or spear of fresh cucumber really makes a big improvement no matter which tonic water you choose.
I actually couldn’t find some of the tonic waters I had read about (Fentiman’s, Indie and 1724) so I can’t recommend them. Plus if they are hard to find in NYC, they aren’t easily obtained. If you find them, please let us know where and how they taste. I can recommend the Q, which is hardly sweetened and quite quinine-ish, and the Fever-tree naturally light, which is a bit sweeter and more traditional tasting but with less sugar than the grocery brands. They are both widely available in grocery stores and gourmet markets. Gin isn’t my drink but judging from a recent party we had, Death’s Door Gin from Washington state is a very well-liked brand as well as the more commonly seen Hendricks and Bombay Sapphire. Not being a scientist or nutritionist, I don’t know the facts on the supposed curative properties of tonic (banishes leg cramps, fights malaria, etc). My understanding is that you would have to drink too much of it to be effective to be practical. Instead of thinking of it as a “tonic” in the medical sense of the word, I just like to think of it as refreshing.
Julia Sherman is more than a good writer and her cookbook, Salad for President, is more than a collection of recipes. She is an artist, interviewer, gardener and cook and her book is an eclectic mix of artist biographies and interviews, charming illustrations, appealing recipes and, by the way, some pretty nice handmade plates and bowls. The recipes are from both Sherman and the artists with whom she talks. Included are the well known like William Wegman and Laurie Anderson but so are many others who I didn’t know but with whom I was happy to become familiar.
The biographic essays, interviews and ingredient discussions are good reading. But more than a good read, Salad for President (from the blog of the same name) is a cookbook full of interesting but not too complicated recipes. When there are exotic ingredients involved, like labneh, like thick yogurt, or myoga, a wild ginger flower, she tells you where to find it or how to make it or if you can do without it. Sherman explains ingredients (like pomegranate molasses), discusses technique (like shredding cabbage finely enough so it fluffs) and offers helpful indices (grouping recipes by season, ingredients, dressings and one on types of greens). Rather than a small index of artisans without any information, just pagination, I wish she had captions with her photographs of bowls and plates, but that is a minor quibble.
There are other wonderful artist-centric cookbooks out there (The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook, Cooking for Artists, Artists’ Recipes, etc.) but Salad for President is both fun to read and to browse and full of recipes I actually want to try. Here salad is art, metaphor, practical technique and a source of inspiration for conversation, creativity and connection as well as, at its core, some delicious looking meals. Whether you buy it or take it out of the library, I am sure you will enjoy many dimensions of this artful book.