It’s hard to tell from the picture but the grilled in this Greek salad actually comes from the romaine. Grilling lettuce sounds like every carnivore’s nightmare but it’s easy to do and makes your lettuce juicy and smoky. Just slice straight through a head of romaine leaving the core intact. Brush both cut sides with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper and flop, cut side down onto a hot grill until the lettuce begins to singe and wilt. I turn off the heat at this point, flip the romaine so that each half’s outer leaves are now touching the grill and leave to cool/cook while I prep.

The rest of the ingredients are your typical Greek salad fare: Kalamata olives, thinly sliced red onion, and diced tomatoes. The tomatoes are out of season but can be pepped up with a little red wine vinegar, salt, and pepper and allowed to rest. The meat is broiled goat steaks but chickpeas would be an excellent meat-free alternative.

For the dressing (not shown) I used David Lebovitz’s Creamy Feta and Red Wine Vinegar Dressing. I really like the idea of adding the cheese to the dressing. It gets more evenly distributed on the salad and with a fairly assertive cheese like feta it’s broken down into more manageable punches of flavor. I might have to try substituting some of the water for Greek yogurt next time to make the dressing even thicker and tangier. All in all an excellent meal and a gentle coax into the summer season of dinner salads.

Curry Base Sauce An hour simmering on the stove and you’ve got three containers of sauce for three different dinners. Pictured: the chicken pathia from the same blog. I skipped the red coloring (ew!) and used just one chicken breast. I also used the sauce with shrimp using this recipe as a starting point I sauteed a sliced onion, two chilies and the shrimp then added the curry base. And finally, vegetable curry.

In my Indian food frenzy I bought about two pounds of red lentils at the co-op, then found an even better deal online (yeah prime shipping!) and decided I should buy some more. So, I have about 8 pounds of red lentils in my cupboard now. Good thing this garlicky red lentil dal is so good and freezes well. I added some fried tofu. It also makes a good dip if you simmer it until thick.

Neither of these recipes are mine and I’m afraid they might not be terribly authentic but they were delicious nonetheless. The soup is an old “keeper” and the focaccia was a first try from the night before crisped up in the oven for round two. I’ve been on a bread baking kick once again and I’m finding new variations on the no knead method. This no knead focaccia turned out well and with all the ingredients in hand it was a snap to put together. I used pan roasted garlic, chopped parsley, kosher salt and olive oil for the top.

Pasta e fagioli I tweak this recipe a bit by using just 1/2 a pound spicy breakfast turkey sausage, a 28 oz can of diced tomatoes and small shell pasta because I can never find ditalini.

Focaccia I love foreign recipes because they include weight measurements for baking which is really much easier (and kitchen scales aren’t expensive but are immensely handy) but here is the recipe on another blog with lots of pictures (and lots of scrolling).

• Hurry-up Black Bean Dip from Epicurious
  (Very good dip, people even asked for the recipe. I used 1/4 of an onion as recommended in the reviews. It was well balanced but I don’t think it would hurt to bump up the cilantro and lime.)
• Web and spider decoration idea shamelessly stolen from Fat Free Vegan Kitchen

from Moosewood Restaurant New Classics by the Moosewood Collective, find it online here

I finally bought a hand blender. My love of soup has certainly grown this month and I’ve gotten tired of injuring myself in the process of transferring soup from pot to blender and back again. I searched for hand blenders and discovered that they are cheap! Ridiculously affordable! I bought this model for $13 on Amazon. The day it arrived I knew I had to make soup and I finally hit upon this recipe which starts with a solid base of diced potatoes and whole cloves of garlic to which you add sauteed onions and lots of spices. Nearly a pound of peas and four very packed cups of spinach adds a hearty dose of green and a can of lite coconut milk brings the flavors together and adds a smooth, creamy touch. The end product is quite thick (I like that the hand blender leaves it uniformly textured) so you might want to try thinning it with a bit of stock. If you get tired of eating it as soup I think you could simmer down a cup or two and use it as a sauce over rice. I’m also thinking about trying it with cauliflower instead of potatoes or omitting the potatoes altogether.

I first had potato-leek soup in Ireland. During a day long bus tour we stopped at a quintessential pub and ate quintessentially Irish food. Many of my classmates had the full breakfast: blood sausage, beans, eggs, indigestion… and I had a bowl of potato-leek soup. It was delicious and for a moment, warming myself next to the peat fire, I didn’t feel quite so homesick. Since then, potato leek soup has had a special place in my heart and this recipe with the addition of rosemary is the best I’ve ever had. It is creamy and full flavored without any of the dairy traditionally used.

from Alice Waters’ Art of Simple Food via The Daily Green

Disclaimer: Dwindling daylight hours, gloomy weather and supreme laziness have conspired to make the following posts picture free. Both recipes however produced soups made out of near white ingredients producing off white and turmeric tinted soups so you’re really not missing much.

I occasionally make purchases at my local co-op that have my cheeks burning with shame at the checkout. The large cauliflower I bought to make this recipe was one of them. It cost me $9.29. That’s nearly $10 for a cauliflower! Even the checkout woman rescanned just to make sure it hadn’t been an error. A plain, white cauliflower not a heirloom variety or one with really cool geometric florets. However, I am Scandinavian and it is not in my nature to express emotion so I politely paid, exited the store and did some serious soul searching on the walk home.

“Am I a yuppy?” I asked myself. I’ve always thought yuppies were of an older generation and I don’t drive a Volvo but I do listen to NPR. Am I so obsessed with emulating an alternative culture contrary to mainstream Nascar watching, birther believing, American cheese eating… that I’m willing to pay a higher price to define myself as a member of the liberal other?

Or, maybe I’m just cheap and resent paying a price that more accurately reflects the true costs of energy, labor, and transportation required to supply me with the cauliflower I needed to make soup. I did after all feel better after I had rationalized the expense into a tidy $1.55 per serving.

All of this leads me to just one more thought, soup is good for anxious people and this soup was so delicious and satisfying upon the first taste that I thought the cauliflower was more than worth the $9.29, well, almost.

• leftover chickpeas (after chickpea salad)
• leftover diced kalamatas (after failed attempt at roasted cauliflower with kalamata dressing)
• basil going limp in the crisper
• cherry tomatoes from the farmer’s market
• a splash of balsamic vinegar
• a pinch of kosher salt