Edible Tulip

Eating On The Cheap! - Lentil, Parsley and Lemon Salad.

So, if you are anything like me, you are broke. Down to your last few dollars. Scraping the coins to buy your dog some lean ground beef for dinner, tossed with a raw egg, some maple syrup, and a clove of garlic. Buying things and chopping and cutting them at night for the next day at work so when you find yourself "peckish" mid-morning, mid-afternoon, or again, if you're like me, and get hungry when bored, then, sadly an all day emptiness, you can just grab another ziplock of whatever: grapes, cherries, almonds and dried apricots, baby carrots & hummous. I prepare both breakfast (cut up melon and berries, my new favourite melon in season being an orange flesh coloured honeydew: sweet and flavourful) and lunch (a large tupper of salad greens, a protein, or 2 (legumes and a sprinkling of nuts or seeds), a dairy (cubes of crumbled feta or diced hard cheese), and an array of pretty things: radishes, sugar snap peas, currants, pepitas, rose hued sea salt. I can't afford to buy breakfast and coffee and snacks and lunch these days. Nope, I'm still in penance for thinking it was a good idea last July to quit my job and move up north with my boyfriend whom I fought with. A lot. I had all sorts of visions in my hand, a century home, a beach, turquoise fresh water, small town charm, ice skating, getting pregnant, getting married, and, well, moving to Italy. By month three, it was pretty clear things were diverting south, downward, and fast. I spent a hefty winter alone in 12 feet of snow. Toronto has been refreshing in many ways but career wise I skidded myself short. I never thought I'd missed paid vacation days but oh, yes, dear god, I do. I keep interviewing with places where they work long hours and on Christmas Eve and until 5 pm on Fridays and again, Oh God, I didn't know how good I had it.

Anyway, back to food, and being broke, if you are as penny pinching as I am these days, well, I have the recipe for you. Provided you like beans and fresh herbs. Buy a large bag of dried split green lentils, the smaller the better. I rinsed and drained about 3 cups worth and added to a large pot with 5x that amount of water. I brought ot a boil and reduced to medium-low and cooked for about 20 minutes. I rinsed and drained and tossed into a large bowl. I chopped up into medium-smallish sized pieces a whole bunch of Italian flat leaf parsley. I tossed with the warm lentils, and added a few tablespoons of toasted sesame seeds, some sea salt, a squeeze of lemon, a few rounds of olive oil drizzles, and a last dash of red wine vinegar. The salad will last me all week. I will add several heaping spoonfuls to shredded red leaf lettuce and call it lunch. Split into five, it costs about 75 cents a day and is marvelously delicious and filling and healthy. Try adding a curry vinaigrette instead to add more punch. Also try adding cooked bulgur or whole wheat couscous. Or, heck, cherry tomatoes.

Lentils have a fair bit of calcium in them, and good amounts of vitamins A and B, as well as being excellent sources of iron and phosphorous.

What's For Lunch on Yonge Street?

Toronto, how I've missed you.

In the short block north from my office, I can get a tattoo, enjoy a jerk chicken dinner for $2.99 (if I was male, I'm sure I could also get a jerk to go if you know what I mean), and browse adult porn at Kinky Times. Yonge Street is an odd stretch of commerce, prostitution, and panhandling, a street the blends government offices with homeless shelters, a street flooded with public servants and those they serve. I stand in line to get a coffee and I chat with the young boy who is all bitching and complaining about having to go up to the second floor. I know what he's talking about, it's where the provincial courts are. It's like trailing a migration pattern watching the young men flock to the entrance to the correctional services. The street outside is sketchy and melancholic. It will exploit you the moment you look away. It's a neon strip, a sleazy tack of fly paper, a short story in a Raymond Carver novel. The narratives are dark and they are dirty. I am not a street urchin comfortable with oily embraces. I often turn away. I do not groove to the urban hum of bass from open windows. I steel my glance to the pavement, away from the crazies, the pimps, the teenage trannsexuals.

But they are here, and they are living large, on Yonge Street, and combined with the student population just south at Ryerson, the staff at Women's College Hospital on Grenville Street, and the various government offices along College and Bay street, it's a transient hive that expands exponentially during the day, specifically at lunch hour. I figured there must be good eats out there. Good, cheap, hole-in-the-wall food. Food that might reflect the complexity of the people and the location in itself. I took a walk north to Maitland and spotted Caribbean jerk, Nepalese, Napolitan pizza parlours, Korean Barbecue, Persian/Iranian, Middle Eastern, Halal, Thai, Mexican, and too many Japanese sushi and fusion Asian joints to list. Next week I begin my Yonge Street culinary exploration.

** In the realm of sharing good finds: Grace at 503 College Street (new spot in the former digs of Xacutti) is having an incredible Thursday night barbecue deal. For $10 you can savour a plateful of chef Dustin Gallagher's slow-braised pork shoulder, char-grilled chicken, and house-made sausage, sided with roasted Indo-spiced corn on the cob, coleslaw, and potato salad. A complimentary domestic brew is included. Only after 8 pm. And first come, first served.

Garlic Buds and Five Salad Dressing Recipes

I'm nearing D-Day, otherwise known as Moving Day, which also, because, nothing in life is free, just happens to be the one day of heavy rains they are forecasting in, oh, the next 21 days. So I thought I'd write a quick piece between pulling my hair out, screaming at the mewling cats, shaking my fists at the wet shaking dog flinging mud on the walls, packing another book, or wrapping another piece of packing paper around some useless glass ware (for those of us who live alone and typically use 1 wine glass and 1 drinking glass and 1 coffee mug why oh why do we insist on having cupboards full of unused drinking vessels), to write about garlic because historically it has long been credited with not only providing but PROLONGING physical strength and it was often fed to Egyptian slaves as they laboured endlessly building the giant pyramids. So if garlic gave courage and might and a touch of sanity to the Egyptians in the face of the impossible, then maybe it will prolong my short bursts of patience just until I can throw all my shoes in a box. (It also appears that in planning a special romantic dinner, aphrodisiacs like oysters and strawberries and fondue and what not are fine for setting a mood, but maybe it's lots of garlic that will end up turning the night into something to remember).

Last year at the Collingwood Farmer's Market, early in the season, there was a man who only sold garlic buds. I use garlic cloves extensively and I have cooked with garlic scapes before as well but these little purple nubs were new to me. The gentleman told me to just break them off with your hand, and use them raw, or cooked, exactly like you would garlic. The papery small wispy things in the picture are not of much use, but the pomegranate coloured buds you see below are where it's at. In cooking, I simply took a bulb and rubbed it between my fingers over the heating olive oil in a pan and they popped off really easily. Their flavour is intense but in a young garlic aromatic way, not in a heady, old, too bitter and tongue marinating sort of way. Ask around next time you visit a market. They have a very short season before they grow up and get all overpowering in their true bulb form. Isn't that always the way.

Here are a few salad dressings that you could crumble a few garlic buds into for bite. I don't think I need to give directions. Just mix the ingredients together, adding the fresh herbs to the salad when tossing with the dressing, and season with sea salt or coarse salt and fresh cracked pepper. Also, feel free to substitute light versions of sour cream and mayo in any of the recipes.

Buttermilk Dressing with Horseradish - good on coleslaw

1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup sour cream
1 tbsp horseradish
1/2 tsp wasabi
2 garlic cloves, minced, or mashed with seasalt OR 4-5 garlic buds
1/4 cup finely chopped parsley
Lemon juice to taste

Green Goddess Dressing

1/2 cup mayo
1/2 cup sour cream
1 Tbsp tarragon
1/2 cup parsley
3 tbsp chopped chives
1 clove garlic, minced, or mashed in seasalt, OR 4-5 garlic buds

Peanut Chile Dressing

1/4 cup roasted peanut oil
2 1/2 tbsp rice vinegar
1 tbsp low sodium soy sauce/tamari
3 garlic cloves, chopped, or 6 garlic buds
1/2 serrano chile, chopped
2 tbsp scallions, chopped

Fresh mint
Fresh cilantro or basil

This dressing is best served warm. Heat the peanut oil, add the garlic, and cook over medium-low until the garlic starts to sizzle, turn down the heat to low, add the rice vinegar, the soy sauce, the chile and the scallions, and simmer until the sauce begins to slightly thicken. Pour over chopped napa cabbage with spears of cooked asparagus, add the chopped fresh herbs, and finish with chopped peanuts or cashews or toasted sesame seeds.

Parmesan-Balsamic Dressing - good on hardy romaine

1 garlic clove, mashed with coarse sea salt, or 3-4 garlic buds
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp lemon juice
1/4 cup finely grated parmesan cheese
1/2 cup olive oil
Fresh basil, chopped/torn into small pieces

Curry Vinaigrette - good on warm lentils or a grain salad

1 garlic clove, mashed with salt, or 3-4 garlic buds
2 tbsp whole fat yogurt or low fat mayo
2 tsp curry powder (best with fresh curry powder from a spice store or indian bazaar)
1 1/2 tbsp lemon juice
5 tbsp sunflower oil
2 tbsp fresh cilantro/mint/parsley, chopped

I make this in a mason jar or a small jam jar and shake until all the ingredient are absorbed and the dairy has been fully broken down. I then toss on the legumes or grains and add the fresh herbs.

Spring Backyard Harvest: Asparagus, Rhubarb, Mint and What To Do With Each of Them

One of the awesome things about sifting through all the mulch in a garden that you don't know is the treasures that lie in wait for you. We moved to this big old century former-baptist-manse house last August. The lawn couldn't really be called a lawn. It was dried up dying patches of flailing grass sort of fighting for survival amidst a desert of dirt. The gardens had been so unkempt for so many years and the grass was knee high in the back yard and it was the thick of August when the crickets never shut up and the weeds twist and shout in a last rhapsody and everything is tall and wild and overgrown and tangled. The air was sweet with pollen and overgrowth. I let everything go and be just as it was thinking next spring I'll tackle this insanity. August is the only month in Ontario that I ever feel like I'm living in the jungle.

So I was out with my bare hands the past few days digging away straws of old growth from last season, trying to decipher the weeds from the goods before madness takes over and they become one. There were your usual suspects out front: tulips (but PINK? why pink?), a few varieties of daffodils (baby ones, yellow ones, mixed yellow and white ones...), hyacinthes (well, I love these cut and in a glass jar fresh from the flower market, but in a garden I think they just look phony), and tall irises are blooming alongside the driveway. So as I bent and I dug and I pulled away the sheathe of winter armour, I found a few surprises: mint (it really has to be the most hardy herb ever - growing out of the asphalt in the driveway?), rhubarb, and asparagus.

So, well I love rhubarb, and I ate it raw as a kid, I don't know what to do with it. It seems so fussy. Although, that said, I do know that to prepare a simple stew of rhubarb takes only the following tasks: wash the stalks and chop them into short lengths, add to a heavy based pan with sugar (linked recipe has details), and cook, over low heat, stirring constantly. Let me know how it goes. My mother came by today to walk the dogs together so we pulled out stalks and she'll stew it with apples and serve it over vanilla icecream. The tanginess of rhubarb, I admit, is absolutely impossible to match. Here is a recipe for stewed rhubarb from the very early days of my blog, my golly, back in 2004. Funnily enough, or not, back then, I was ALSO living in a cabin in the country and I was also marveling at the wonders of an unknown garden coming into being before my own eyes. If only I knew then what I know now about how that fateful summer would play out. I am however pleased beyond reason that for all the dips and turns and after four long years of office work in Toronto I somehow found my way back up north, right back in the same transcendental valley, alongside a waterway that connects me back to that very place 365 days times 4.75. So this plot may be a new rhubarb altogether but it's brought me full circle.

I was a bit shocked to see TWO (yes, only two, but I see more coming through the earth) thick and ready stalks of asparagus pulling through the earth and reaching high. They, like anything really, taste best when eaten the day they are snapped off their root. If you happen to have a bunch of thick fresh asparagus spears then by all means cook them quickly, in a large frying pan of water brought to the boil. They will change colour, to a deep green, fairly quickly. Test repeatedly until you like their doneness. Serve with a brown butter, a scattering of roasted chopped hazelnuts or a strong mustardy hollandaise. If you are serving grilled fish, then cook your asparagus last and simply toss with a very garlicky vinaigrette. Side with some buttered/chived baby potatoes. Here I wrote about the history of asparagus and included a recipe for Salsa Verde which is I had forgotten delicious served over top steaming asparagus spears.

Clearly mint really romps. It's climbed the side of the house and it's growing in the driveway in any crevice the pavement cracks open to allow air and sunlight. I have loved being able to pluck a few sprigs for lunch but it's also delicious added to yogurt, garlic and a seeded chopped cucumber to side with grilled chicken. If you're not that into cooking then mint goes with a trillion spring cocktails. If you're crafty, I'm not particularly, but this is easy enough, then freeze mint leaves in ice cube trays with water and add to cool summer drinks. And in this recipe from many years back I wrote about tossing mint with fresh strawberries and a bit of lemon juice and sugar. Strawberries are, of course, not yet in season in Ontario. Heck, we're not even in the heart of spring yet, but mint would also be excellent with a just ripe mango and some feta cheese and a drizzle of lime juice.

The Health Benefits of Apple Cider Vinegar and a Vinaigrette for Potato Salad

I'm not a huge fan of apple cider, warm or cold, so I stayed away from the cider vinegars that I used to see at the bulk store and the health food store. I think the reasoning behind my buying some for the first time many years ago was the retro glass jug it came in (not the one pictured above), sort of like a magician's apothecary vessel holding misting potion, AND the cheap price (I believe $2.99 for 3L) for something natural, aged in wood, unpasteurized and naturally fermented. Who could resist the temptation?

Apple Cider Vinegar (ACV) soon became a regular in my ever growing assortment of vinegars and oils. I liked the tangy almost harsh taste; it has none of the sweetness of a balsamic vinegar. I think it's more like a wine vinegar, slightly fruity with musk tones. I actually bought this particular batch for my dog, Simon. I feed him a raw food dinner and the apple cider vinegar is supposed to have numerous pet benefits: adding it to raw ground beef reduces any bacteria the meat may contain; it is also a natural flea preventative and it makes coats shiny and healthy.

ACV is an age-old folk remedy for a staggering away of common ailments: pet and environmental allergies; high cholesterol; sinus infections; the flu; chronic fatigue; candida; sore throats; itchy dry skin conditions like dermatitis; and even arthritis (helps the last one in animals too). I wondered how ACV could be a positive medicine for candida when typically you are encouraged to avoid alcohol and acid during a high yeast growth period because it kills off the good bacteria. Over on the website Earth Clinic Folk Remedies I found an explanation: "Apple Cider Vinegar in itself is alkaline because of its "ash" content, which means if the apple cider vinegar was burned, what is left over becomes ash. When you check for the pH of that ash and dissolve it with water, the content is alkaline. Whenever our body digests anything, it undergoes oxidation, which is similar to burning and the end result is that you can determine whether the end product was alkaline or acid. Apple Cider Vinegar has anti-fungal, anti-bacterial, and anti-viral properties, primarily coming from the malic acid and acetic acid portion of the vinegar. Apple cider vinegar acts as a buffer in the body because the acetic acid reacts with base or acid compounds to form an acetate, therefore rendering them chemically bioavailable for the body's utilization. Additionally, Apple Cider Vinegar can reduce the toxicity of certain compounds by converting the toxin into an acetate compound, which is less toxic. This is why they are ideal for insect bites and certain skin allergies. While Apple Cider vinegar in itself is considered alkaline, a chemically pure vinegar (acetic acid) is neither acid nor basic forming as it leaves no ash as the entire portion, when burned evaporates completely".

Potato Salad with Apple Cider Vinegar Dressing

1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons dijon mustard
3 large garlic cloves, minced
3 tablespoons capers, rinsed, drained and chopped
1 tablespoon each fresh marjoram and fresh thyme, chopped

As far as the potato salad goes, you can prepare it however you like. For this very basic picnic table potato salad dish, I simply boil 3 pounds of small red skinned potatoes until they break apart when pierced with a fork. I drain them, place them in a large ceramic platter, and coat with the dressing while they are still warm/hot. The ACV seems like a high ration with the olive oil (i.e. half to half) but because it gets soaked into the potatoes, it seems less vinegary and instead adds a welcome punch. I chop up some red onion and toss that in to. The fresh herbs carry the rest of it. 

Quinoa Salad with Corn and Lentils and Fresh Mint

And so the chapter of my life spent in Collingwood and environs is nearing a close. Although this moment couldn't seem to arrive fast enough during the cold days and dark nights of a winter spent alone in a town in the snow belt, I am happy that the days to come will seem swollen with appreciation in comparison. If you scroll back to all the merry cheer and fesitive feelings leading up to Christmas, you'll see that all of that exploded in what can only be understood as years of pent up resentment between two people in a passionately combative relationship. Moving in together for the first time is stressful. Moving in together for the first time in a remote town is even more stressful. Throw in a few years of feisty arguing and constant break up and you get the picture. Two smart sweet but proud individuals can use words like weapons dipped in sarcasm. Dagger me with a childhood fear? I'll bayonet you with your darkest secret. Yes. There was a lot of frozen front-porch silence. The orange glow of a lit cigarette trailing through the blackness like a seasonally lost firefly. The boy left with the car. I stayed with the dog and the two cats.

It's 5 months later and things are as different as you couldn't have drummed up back when it was all so terrible. Time, distance, accountability, memory, and spring in particular all do that to a person. The crushing claustrophobia of winter is gone. I am so imbued with the magic of this season, the core of its essence, the smells, the grace, and the dirt that binds it all together, that I momentarily feel certain that I have never been so happy. I am taking the dog and the cats and moving back to Toronto. We'll be living near a ravine so we won't leave nature too far behind. It is what keeps us honest, after all. Walking to pick up conveniences will be a marvelous treat. I have always been good about keeping my cupboards simply stocked -- dried grains and pastas, canned beans and tomatoes, tins of tuna, jars of capers and pickles, and extensive herbs and spices -- but the past several months have brought my sense of creativity to new heights.I have been spent a few months rationed with basic supplies picked up on weekly excursions with a borrowed vehicle. By the end of the week, I'm down to a few simple resources. And that, my friends, is where this recipe comes in. Today it is raining and Simon the dog and I took a long wet walk looking for the turtles we found yesterday and surprising a cotton-tailed bunny. We got back and I was hungry. I looked in the cupboards, the fridge and the freezer. I had a can of lentils. A bag of frozen corn. A glass jar of toasted sesame seeds. The fleur de sel from my sister in Belgium. A lidded glass container of dried quinoa. And, by golly, mint growing like weeds alongside the driveway has climbed the hot bricks of yesterday's sunshine in an almost obnoxious vigour. Here's lunch. Turned out delicious. Hope you enjoy. I served my heaping spoonfuls of the salad on chopped romaine, for flavour, for crunch, for photosynthetic vitamins.

Quinoa Salad with Lentils and Corn, serves 4 - 6 as a side dish or a salad

1/2 cup quinoa (rinsed under warm water for 3 minutes)
1/3 English cucumber, diced
2 green onions, including the green ends, chopped
1 1/2 cup frozen corn, boiled then drained, or 1 can of kernal corn, rinsed and drained
1 can lentils, rinsed, drained*
Grated zest of 2 lemons
6 to 8 tablespoons of fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
Dash of paprika
red pepper flakes
2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds
Fleur de sel
Black pepper
1/4 cup chopped fresh mint

Bring 1 cup of water to a boil and add 1/2 teaspoon of salt and the quinoa. Lower the heat, cover, and simmer until the grains are tender and have absorbed mostly all the water, about 10 minutes. Drain.

Chop the cucumber and the green onions and place in a large bowl. Add the cooked corn, the rinsed lentils, and the quinoa (once it's been cooled to room temperature).

Whisk together the lemon zest, the olive oil, and the lemon juice. Add a dash of paprika. Pour over the salad mixture, and toss to coat. Add the sesame seeds, and season to taste with the fleur de sel and coarse black pepper. Garnish with the mint.

Note: A curry vinaigrette would also be good! 

*For some reason, I find the No Name brand of lentils has smaller, firmer lentils than the name brands.

Lentil Salad with Toasted Sesame Seeds

 I tend to go raw and unsalted with my almonds, cashews, sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds. The flavour is more authentic when they aren't toasted and salted and I feel like they have more of a true 'nut' taste for adding to salads. Sesame seeds, on the other hand, are tiny little specks that pack a punch, and when they're toasted, their flavour is even more delightful. Like spices, when nuts are toasted, gently, and not burned, the intensity of their unique taste increases. I love sprinkling sesame seeds onto a huge plate of lightly steamed broccoli and asparagus pieces, tossing with oil and lemon juice, and filling up on goodness. They're also a good match for a hearty green like spinach, and legumes that don't have too distinct a taste, such as chickpeas and lentils. For this lunchtime salad, I simply tossed some lettuce/spinach with rinsed lentils and slivers of red pepper and added a Tbsp of toasted sesame seeds. I mixed a few drops of dark sesame oil with a dressing of canola oil and rice vinegar and then I ground white pepper over top.

There are crocuses already in bloom on the south wall of the house; they've burst open in blasts of violet and white. The air has lost its wintry bite and its now thick with spring - wet, heavy, perfumed. The hills are cloaked in fog. The shoreline's stillness is punctuated by huge swathes of birds that descend en masse. I become full of romance when I walk in the early mornings. I twirl in the forest, my jeans splattered with mud, the dog halfway down a rabbit hole. Spring is tattooed in Chinese characters on my back. It is one of the only things in the world that I know that makes me scream in glee.

Cauliflower, Beet & Sunflower Seed Salad and Radish, White Bean & Cucumber Salad with Mint

I bought a clump of fresh sprigs of mint a week or more ago to use with barely ripe mango, tangy feta, crisp sugarsnap peas and tiny grape tomatoes. It was an array of fresh bursts of flavours and the mint was simply the perfect distinct herbal zing of decisiveness. I don't often buy mint. I like it in mojitos and fresh lemonade but I can't say I love it in food. I feel a knee-jerk reaction to mint deep something akin to a bad memory. I think I had flouride treatment that was so awful and left such a residue of fake peppermint mixed with an antiseptic taste in my mouth that even the smell of fresh mint can have a bad reaction on me. So why would I buy it is a good question. I think when I see greenhouse tomatoes turning ripe and I have some soft white cheese and a tub of cured black olives I remember the goodness of mint. So, after my mango salad with mint, I was left with a rather still large clump of mint leaves. You can't cook with mint like you can with basil or thyme or rosemary. It's best eaten fresh. So, all week, I've tried to incorporate it into my lunches with various ingredients I had on hand to see how well the mint matched with a variety of flavours.

Picture on the left is a piled high salad with the base a blend of chopped iceburg lettuce and spring baby lettuces, mounded with chopped cauliflower, grated beets, chopped mint, crumbled queso fresca, and sunflower seeds. I threw in some goji berries too because they are chewy and bitter and prettily pink and full of antioxidents and a good match for the earthiness of raw cauliflower. I put ample ground black pepper over everything, added sea salt, and tosssed with a canola oil/olive oil blend and white balsamic vinegar.

Pictured on the right is a white bean and radish salad. I am taken by contrasting colours and I'm not afraid of crudites, like some people. I like the simplicity, the elegance, of a single radish dipped in a sprinkling of salt. I like sliced cucumbers marinated in tarragon vinegar. I will wander around a farmers market eating a green pepper like an apple. Some people have a stomach of steel when it comes to street food; me? I can eat a plate of raw vegetables and ROAR. Other people are not so lucky with lots of roughage. The beans in this salad are white kidney beans. I bought them to stew with olive oil and garlic and then top with a whole head of braised rapini. I ate the rapini though and was left with the kidney beans so I thought, hey, they're less flavourful than many other beans, and would be a nice match for mint. I intensified the earthiness of this salad with raw radishes chopped into strips, half an english cucumber diced, extra virgin olive oil, a pinch of herbes de provence, and a squeeze of lemon. Lots of pepper and a bit of salt were added too. A huge chunk of dense, hard crusted French bread was eaten too, sopping up the oil, and the herbs.

The Taste of Spring v.1: Almond Beet Salad and Mango Avocado Salad

 

After a weekend of eating in New York City followed by a week with a guest visiting (eating out, eating ample meat, making dinners that included luxuries like lobster tail, drinking a lot of wine), I'm ready to reclaim my puritanical approach to eating. If I lived in a sunnier, more hospitable environment, I'm quite certain I would thrive living in a shed in the middle of the woods with my dog and 2 cats and fields of edibles all around me. I'd just need one decent bulk health food store within walking distance where I could buy grains. Otherwise it'd be a veritable cornucopia of greens, nuts/seeds, fungi, tubers... the serendipitous life of a forager. I'm eating enormous salads for lunch. They are based on my "three ingredient" concept, but there is so much more flavour and colour and variety that can be added, or substituted for what I present. Spring is not really in the air yet where I live. Snow still covers the ground and ice reaches far out into the horizon over Georgian Bay, but there is song bird to be heard, at an increased, almost frenetic pace, which means something.

On most of my lunch salads centred around greens, a legume, a dairy, I forgo a complex dressing and simply dress everything right before eating with a vinegar (white balsamic, red wine, rice wine) or squeezed fresh lemon juice, and a swirl of canola/olive oil blend or straight olive oil, and then I toss and add sea salt, cracked black pepper, and usually a sprinkle of red pepper flakes. 

Raw Almond, Grated Beet and Beet Green Salad

Take a handful of raw almonds and chop them into pieces. Throw them into a large eating bowl. Take a medium sized fresh beet, peel it, wash it, and then grate it using either a food processor with the grate blade, or with a hand held grate using the largest hole size. Watch your fingers. And wear thin latex gloves if you don't want your palms stained a slight hue of purple. When you have grated the entire beet, take the mound in your hand, and squeeze it over a sink so most of the liquid gets expunged. Add the beets to the bowl. Take the fresh beet greens, pinch them off at the top of the stem, wash and spin dry. Chop or tear into large pieces. Coat lightly in dressing.

Mango, Avocado and Arugula Salad with Fresh Mint

My Price Chopper grocery store in town had the smallish, kidney-shaped yellow mangoes down to 69 cents a pop so I bought a handful of them. In the heat of summer, I prefer the larger, green mangoes spotted with red because their fruit tends to be firmer, and more tart. In winter however the smaller variety (which I believe is called the Alphonso, although I could be mistaken, see this extensive list to view all the mango cultivars around the world) is the one that ripens more pleasingly. One the same trip to the grocery store, I noticed that avocados were also on sale for the same price per fruit so I bought one. The two flavours are unsurprisingly extremely compatible. Tartness matched by succulence, creaminess saved by density, and a really powerful earthiness indulged by a subtle sweetness. A match made in culinary heaven, to be sure. I cute up both in smallish cubes and tossed with a touch of lemon juice. I added several handfuls of washed and dried wild arugula and tossed everything with olive oil, sea salt and cracked pepper.

Chopped fresh herbs are always a wonderful addition to salads but they can be overpowering and they have radically different tastes and flavour-points so it's best to stick with the ones you know as you experiment matching them with different fruits and vegetables and finding the right blend for. I added a few sprigs of fresh mint to the Mango salad, chopped finely, and it worked really well. Mint and fruit (watermelon, canary melon, honeydew, lemons/limes, mango, tomato) tend to work really well, as do mint and yogurt or any kind of tart dairy product.

Yogurt-Mint Salad & Chicken Tacos Alambres

I love having company for dinner. And I don't mean a dinner party event with a huge meal planned and prepped in advance, no, I mean sharing a meal with a friend, a sibling, a parent, a lover, an ex-lover, a once upon a time lover, a potential lover (in some cases the previous four examples are actually one in the same person!), a neighbour, your nana, your niece. Whatever, and whoever, it doesn't really matter, cooking with, or cooking for, someone helps get us all out of our personal food comfort zones. I use chicken quite a bit when I'm cooking solo but it's usually in a Thai influenced curry, boiled, then shredded, and added to a hot skillet with baby corn and lemongrass, fresh basil and green beans. In this case, I decided to cook a Mexican-inspired taco (soft shell made of corn) and have the chile-seared chicken cut into small pieces and tossed with fresh corn, ample cilantro, and lots of lime juice. A soft, mild cheese is added just before the final toss of the ingredients and the result is a spicy, citrusy, cheesy mound of chicken-tortilla-filling that is absolutely delicious. We lay flat warm corn tortillas and made a mound in the middle of the chicken filling shown above. We topped the filling with guacamole and Herdez brand Mexican salsa which I find less tomato-y than most store brought salsas and more typical of a Pico de Gallo flavour. A tomatilla Salsa would also be great. I served the tortillas with a salad of hearty greens and radicchio and tossed in a slightly sweet, yet tangy, dressing made with whole fat plain yogurt, a bit of honey, and lots of fresh mint.