You will love this spinach salad. It’s one of those twists on a classic that is easy to make, but, in my opinion, full of much more flavor.
I stumbled on it by accident one day when I was needing to a quick lunch and there was prosciutto leftover from another recipe that needed to be used up. We tend to buy the mega-bags or boxes of spinach from Costco so there is always spinach in the house. Always.
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I cook with broccoli a lot. But I can’t say it’s because I particularly like it. It’s more of my it’s-good-for-you sense prevailing. I don’t exactly dislike it. It’s not bottom of the barrel in terms of vegetables I can’t stand. No, broccoli just falls somewhere in the middle.
Unless we’re talking about broccoli salad. Then, oddly enough, things change.
I have no idea why. Maybe it’s akin to drowning raw vegetables in ranch dressing, but I’d like to think this has a few more nutrients than that combination.
When I make broccoli salad. I could eat the whole bowl. I love the classic, but over the years, I’ve come up with my own version. For example, crunchy bacon pieces are great in it, but I rarely feel like cooking bacon when I can throw together the salad in minutes otherwise.
So I’ve improvised to create a similar flavor without the work.
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I’ll start out by saying that this salad is loaded with Parmigiano Reggiano. You don’t have to use that Parmesan cheese to make it. But if you can get your hands on some I’d highly recommend it.
We had the grand opportunity to visit Parma when we were in Italy in early April and were treated to a tour. It ended with a generous gift of two boxes of the cheese which we made sure to get back to the US, even if it meant it traveled to Lisbon and London before it got there.
The tour was outstanding. Unfortunately, I have yet to explore my photos from the trip. Soon…
Until then, we’ve been eating it and I’ve been cooking with it a bit here and there. Including this salad.
Late summer.
I love those words.
They mean there is light at the end of a tunnel of hot, long days. You see flashes of orange pumpkins and cream colored butternut squash, but you still hold bright, ripe tomatoes in your hand along with crunchy cucumbers and possibly still some sweet corn.
Most people might consider the holidays the season of hope. But this. This is my season of hope. I’m hopeful that I just might make it through another hot summer in California’s Central Valley.
Truth be told, though, my coping mechanism is really to stay on the road a lot. That mission has been successful lately which has meant few blog posts and a need for lighter, wholesome foods upon my return.
It’s making our epic tomato season come in handy. I kept things simple this year and only planted cherry tomatoes and Early Girl plants, fearing they would all die like previous years.
Now that they are doing so well, I’m kicking myself that I didn’t plant some rarer heirloom varieties.
But then something magical happened.
So I’m happy to say that Fake Food Free has transitioned to the Substack Newsletter called Every Corner of the World.
I hope to see you there.
Every now and then in my monthly newsletter, I have a section called Not Really a Recipe. It’s where I share some of the ordinary foods that I eat for meals that are simply a combination of ingredients without much measurement.
This shrimp cobb salad falls into that category.
This spring pea salad uses farm fresh peas and combines them with green onions and crunchy walnuts. It’s dressed in a yogurt-based sauce that is seasoned with za’atar, a Middle Eastern herb and spice blend.
Pea salad. We’ve had a love-hate relationship for as long as I can remember.
It has a bit to do with the pea salad I grew up with – canned or frozen peas and a mayo-based dressing. My family loved the stuff at get-togethers, but I always skipped over it in favor of macaroni or potato salad.
But spring pea salad? This I can get behind. It sounds the same, but there is a key difference.
Fresh peas.
I love Brussels sprouts. LOVE them.
Maybe you can tell since this is my second recipe in just a couple weeks. But sometimes there is a problem.
I love them so much that I forget that other people don’t. I have some news if you fall into that category.
You may actually like this salad.
Why do I think that?
Fig season isn’t over yet, is it? My fresh figs are long gone, but I’ve still been seeing them around online so hopefully I’m not too late.
I made this salad a few weeks ago and have been meaning to post it ever since. Travel picked up for me in September and as usual the blog was the first thing I could put on the back burner for a few days.
So here I sit with a tasty fig salad recipe to share and fig season is coming dangerously close to ending.
The inspiration for this came from my friend Tracey. She told me about a salad she makes with bacon and figs and it got me thinking about similar combinations.
For a long time, heirloom tomatoes were my absolute favorite thing about summer. Lately, though they have fallen ever so slightly in their ranking to make it closer to a tie with something else.
Corn.
That probably seems a lot less exciting, but I think it’s because the older I’ve gotten, and the less I’ve had corn from our own garden growing up, the more I appreciate a really good ear.
I can still remember going to friend’s houses in the summer and my hosts joyfully proclaiming that we were having sweet corn for dinner. One bite into those chewy, tough kernels and it was all I could do not to set the ear down and leave it be for the rest of the meal.
That was not sweet corn. If you’ve ever had an ear at its peak ripeness, you know the difference. Good corn is crisp with kernels that literally explode with flavor in your mouth. There is nothing quite like it.
Fortunately, I haven’t had a difficult time finding good corn here. There is a farm nearby that grows corn in the summer and pumpkins in the fall and winter. I usually try to buy from them, but even the ears I pick up at the grocery store from time to time tend to be really great.
I hate to say it, but I’m pretty sure my days of canning are over. Or at least on pause for a while.
I’m not opposed to doing it again, but I learned something pretty quickly after our big garden and endless canning motivation back in Kentucky – we can’t eat it all. Especially when it is jam, or jalapenos, or relish.
Salsa we did a pretty good job of polishing off, but the rest of it? It was just too much to have around or even to give away.
These days my time is spent making small batches of jam in a saucepan and popping it in the fridge, versus a water bath for long term storage. Same goes for pickling – it is small batch quick pickling all the way.
Growing up we always had cucumber salad in the summer made with a sugar and vinegar dressing.
I still make a similar version, but with a bit less sugar. Occasionally I throw in other veggies which is how this salad came about.
