Salad Days - elda eats

“My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood, to say as I said then!” ~Cleopatra, from Antony and Cleopatra, Act 1, Scene 5, 67-75

Oh, Cleopatra. Here she is pretty much dissing her long-ago affair with Julius Caesar and blaming it all on her youth. She was green and cold, much like a vegetable. Her salad days were done and, as written by Shakespeare, she was much wiser in her present state in the arms of Mark Antony.

So much for that.

What does Cleopatra have to do with these next two recipes in the Cook the 40 Challenge? Nothing, really. Except that the recipes are both salads, and well, I like working in as many Shakespeare references I can on any given day.

Or in any given blog post.

Big Salads

I do like salads. Especially big salads. Salads loaded with crunchy veggies, cheese, meats and tons of blue cheese dressing. With extra cheese and dressing on top for good measure. Along with crispy croutons. My salads are not very healthy though as they are full of calories. And because of that I don’t eat them as often as I’d like, or as often as I count calories, which food blog aside, is often.

Anyway, calorie counting may be a topic for another post.

And so, salads in the Cook the 40 Challenge? I was a bit skeptical, because I mean, they’re salads.

Let’s see if they warranted the best-ever list…

Photo of the magazine cover. — Best-ever recipes? Let’s see how the next two salad recipes measure up.

Cook the 40

Why take on Food & Wine’s best-ever recipes from their forty years in publication? Well, after making the first six recipes (featured in my prior blog posts), I will admit that the magazine knows what it’s doing. I’m glad I decided to cook along!

I was looking forward to making the next two recipes, because I knew I’d likely be eating them with juicy steaks.

(Because they are only salads…)

40 Years of Food & Wine

According to the September 2018 anniversary issue of Food & Wine, and editor Hunter Lewis, https://twitter.com/notesfromacook?lang=en, what makes a good recipe is it being delicious, of course, and (I think even more important sometimes) the best recipes “tell a story worth repeating.” Well said, Hunter.

I am not sure what kind of stories these 40 best-ever recipes will tell from my kitchen’s point of view, but I am excited to find out.

The next recipe on the list would be my seventh. I do love tapenade, olives and mozzarella!

The Seventh Recipe

Quite honestly, I chose this recipe to make next (and the one after this, too) because I wanted something easy to make with a steak. I pretty much followed the recipe exactly except that I made black olive tapenade as I couldn’t find green olive tapenade in a jar.

Nancy Silverton, whose recipe this is, is the cofounder of Campanile and La Brea Bakery, and co-owner of Osteria Mozzarellas and Pizzeria Mozzarellas in Los Angeles. According to the magazine, she “is famous for her baking, but she’s also a master of Italian flavors.”

I did not know who Ms. Silverton was before this recipe, but her posts on social media show lots of delicious looking pizza. Let’s see how delicious this salad turns out.

Food & Wine’s Recipe from 2005: Antipasto Salad with Green Olive Tapenade by Nancy Silverton

Prepping and getting ready to put together…

The process was a simple one, really: Stir together peperoncini, olive oil and tapenade in a bowl, add in the mozzarella balls. In another bowl, I whisked together lemon juice, red wine vinegar, garlic and oregano, then season with salt and pepper. You then combine the shredded lettuce, salami and the cheese mixture. Toss with the vinaigrette, put it all on a big platter, add the olives and basil, and drizzle on the remaining vinaigrette. That’s it.

That’s it, and here it is. Three pretty simple steps and you have a fancy salad.

A juicy ribeye, a dry red wine and warm sourdough, and you have yourself a meal!

2005: The Year I Came Home

2005 is one of my favorite years. Why? Because it’s the year I moved back home to Texas.

After living fourteen years in Chicago, meeting the love of my life, learning lots about myself and life, I decided to move back home.

Besides moving to Chicago in the first place, and falling in love with Peter, moving back home was one of the best decisions I knew I would eventually make. Home is where you can be yourself, be anything, do anything; live your best life, as they say.

Home is where you make it, and home for me will always be Texas.

I dragged my main man down home to Texas with me. This is us in our apartment in Austin in 2005.

At work in 2005, raising money for Hurricane Katrina relief – by selling food, of course.
2005 was a year worthy of champagne as I was back home in Texas.

The Eighth Recipe: 1990’s Baked Goat Cheese Salad by Alice Waters

I was definitely looking forward to the next salad recipe by Alice Waters, because, well GOAT CHEESE! I love goat cheese.

And I also love croutons. Homemade garlic croutons are even better.

This salad included one extra step for me as I made Peter a keto version using pork rinds instead of bread crumbs for the breading; and instead of croutons, Peter got big pork rinds for some crunchy texture.

Both versions were a win-win!

Even before this cooking challenge, I knew who Alice Waters was. I was excited to make her recipe.

I decided to use two different flavors of goat cheese: plain and with garlic & herbs.

Making these beauties was half the fun!
Recipe prep with beer for drinking.
The goat cheese needed to marinate overnight.
Peter’s keto version. He loved it!
The version Alice Waters intended which I also loved.

A pretty plate, and the salad was perfect with this filet mignon.

1990

1990 was a turning point year for me because that summer I decided I would move to Chicago.

I was not in the best possible mindset of my life, and I needed a change. Somewhere at the beginning of the year, I had thought I’d move to a big city somewhere north. Maybe Boston, maybe New York, maybe Chicago. Those were the big three to me at the time, and I thought those were cities where I could get a job as a writer at a newspaper. (That’s what my goal was at the time…a subject for another blog post in the future, perhaps.)

I ultimately decided on Chicago because of baseball, because of the Cubs. If I would have chosen Boston, it would have been because of hockey, because of the Bruins. And well, New York, because it was New York. At the end of the summer, or sometime in July, I decided it would be Chicago. I had never been before, but I would go in September, for a quick trip to see a game in old Comiskey Park before they tore it down—and to see if The Windy City was as beautiful as it appeared on WGN.

It was. And it will always be beautiful to me. Chicago is where I really grew up, where I met Peter and where I decided that I really wanted to travel the world and see everything and also that I eventually wanted to go back home to Texas.

1990 was a good year. For salads and for me.

Making tortillas in the summer of 1990 in my townhouse apartment in Austin.

Seeing Wrigley Field for the first time in September 1990.

On the way to Chicago that September, we stopped in St. Louis where the Cubs were in town. It seemed meant to be.

I didn’t plan to cook these two recipes one right after the other, from two years that seem to be bookends of sorts. One year had me see the beginning of a decision to make a new life, and then well, the other year I decided to come back home. The recipes just worked out that way, though. And both years ended up working out the same way for me, better than I ever could have imagined.

Elda XO

For more information on both of these delicious recipes, click here to be taken to the Food & Wine links:

https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/antipasto-salad-green-olive-tapenade

https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/baked-goat-cheese-salad

Bon appetit!