Category Archives: snacks

Biscuits.

Posted on February 13, 2010 by parsnipsaplenty| 5 Comments

You can tell a foodie by how she packs for an extended trip abroad. When I moved to Bulgaria, I took black beans and quinoa, and I left a list of foods that my friends and family should feel free to send any time they had an urge to put a care package together. Sage! I said. Ranch dressing mix! Molasses! Marcy scours the Asian grocery before a trip to Europe. Nolan brings a jar of mole. When Krista went to Mexico, she made room in her suitcase for a 5-pound bag of White Lily flour. This is how I knew we’d be friends.

I have spent much of my brief life looking for good biscuits. Usually, I paid for them. (I think there’s a support group for that.) Outside the American south, amazing biscuits are hard to come by – most folks don’t understand that the point is to use just enough flour to hold all the fat together. What ends up happening without this rule is a lump of baked dough that tastes like toothpaste without the minty freshness, thanks to all the baking soda that gets thrown in.

I could always make decent biscuits, but I needed a gobstopper of a recipe to support the technique I understood. A few weeks ago, I found it. It’s in the Gourmet cookbook, and everyone who’s eaten these that I’ve made for them has said little more than “oh. Woah” before they vacuum them up off the plate. Then they look at me in adoration, a buttery gleam in their eyes, and say, “…could you, uh, make those again?”

You’d think that I would make enough of a recipe that people wouldn’t need to ask for a second batch. But when a stick of butter makes only four biscuits… Well, you’ve got to pace yourself.

When I made them this morning, I took a bite, held it for a second, and literally felt it melting in my mouth. I didn’t know that was possible with anything that wasn’t chocolate ganache. I see no other biscuit recipe but this one from now on.

Biscuits
adapted from The Gourmet Cookbook
makes 4 giant biscuits

2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon coarse sea salt
1 stick butter, chilled and cut in tablespoons
3/4 cup well-shaken buttermilk (I like to use 1/4 cup almond milk and 1/2 cup yogurt)

Preheat to 425F. In a large bowl stir together flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Add butter and cut in with forks or a pastry cutter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add buttermilk and stir just to combine.

Turn out onto a well-floured surface and knead 5-6 times, until the dough starts to come together. Pat into a small circle, about an inch and a half thick. Using a 2″ ring mold, punch straight down into the dough, no twisting. Reform dough and cut out three more biscuits. Bake 10-15 minutes, until golden brown and delicious. (You’ll hear them sizzle on the pan. It’ll be great.) Eat with apple butter and sweet tea.

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Posted in baked, breakfast, pantry-dependent, quickbreads, snacks

Sweet Potato and Pear Hand Pies

Posted on October 21, 2009 by parsnipsaplenty| 4 Comments

Every few days since I wrote the last entry, I would say to myself, “I really should update the blog.” I’ve been cooking, and taking pictures, but when it comes to writing things down, I’ve just gotten lazy. Let’s blame it on… shorter days, less sunlight, hibernation-with-book tendencies, busyness at work, misaligned planets, rain on Tuesdays? Finally today, Nico said to me, “You know, you’ve been making Thai tea ice cream for ages.”

I made these a couple of weeks ago. On the phone with my dad one Saturday morning, I said, “What should I cook today?” and he relied, “Sweet potatoes and wine.” Very doable. I felt like some weekend baking, and I wanted something that I could eat casually but didn’t mind taking some time to work on. Stumbling across this recipe on Real Food Rehab, I cooed and headed straight into the kitchen.

This is a great pie crust recipe, using an egg to help it stand up to the little bit of mauling necessary to make the half-moon shapes. I’d never made little pastry pockets like this before, and as I pressed the ends of these together with a fork, I kept looking at them and going, “….aw.” When I ate them, though, cuteness turned into lustiness. Rich sweet potatoes spiked with wine and laced with 7-spice powder: how can you go wrong?

Lebanese 7-spice powder (in some cases it’s Syrian) is the ace up my spice rack’s sleeve. If you can find this in a Middle Eastern grocery, you’re in like Flynn. If you can’t, don’t despair – use a combination of allspice and black pepper. I made the filling vegan by using soy creamer and Earth Balance, but I’d be hard-pressed to let go of that egg in the crust.

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Sweet Potato and Pear Hand Pies
crust recipe from Kate Neumann, as printed by Dana Joy Altman
makes about 16

crust
3 2/3 cups all purpose flour
2 tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. salt
10.5 ounces (about 2.5 sticks) unsalted butter, very cold and cubed
2 eggs, cold & gently beaten
1/4 cup ice water

filling
1 medium-sized sweet potato, 1″ dice
sweet white wine
1 medium-sized pear, peeled and cut into 1/2″ dice
1 teaspoon Lebanese 7-spice powder
2 tablespoons cream
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup apple butter
1/4 cup brown sugar

Combine flour, sugar, salt and butter in a large mixing bowl. Using your hands or a pastry cutter, work the fat in until it’s broken down into pea-sized pieces. Add one of the eggs and mix with a wooden spoon. Then, pour ice water in tablespoon increments until dough looks “shaggy”, feels a bit wet, and holds together only if you smush a bit in your hands. Knead the dough together by hand, no more than a minute, and form into a round disc, cover with plastic wrap and let chill in fridge for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, make filling: Bring salted water to a boil in a 2-quart saucepan and add diced sweet potato, along with maybe half a cup of wine. Cook until sweet potato is very soft, then drain. Put sweet potato in a large mixing bowl along with remaining filling ingredients. Mash until… well, until it’s mashed. Add another glug of white wine and stir that in.

On a well-floured counter or pastry board, roll dough out to 3/16″ thickness and cut out 4″ rounds. (You can use the outline of the rim of a bowl and trace it out with a knife.) Place each cut round on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and a light dusting of flour. The scraps can be combined and rolled out again. Place a heaping tablespoon of filling in the center of each disc.

Whisk the egg. Brush a half circle of egg around the edge of exposed pastry to act as “glue.” Fold the circle in half and press down the edges with a fork to seal. Chill for at least one hour, and preheat the oven to 375F.

Before baking, brush surface of the crust with egg, cut three slits as vents and sprinkle with sugar. Bake for about 45 minutes until golden brown.

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Posted in autumn, baked, breakfast, fruity, middle eastern, pies, snacks

Coconut Lime Shortbread

Posted on June 15, 2009 by parsnipsaplenty| 1 Comment

Shortbread, short entry.

This is an infinitely adaptable basic recipe: one part sugar, two parts butter, three parts flour (by weight). Because it’s so simple, you should bring out the good butter for this. Or the good… coconut oil?

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Coconut Lime Shortbread
makes about 20 cookies

2 cups all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (one stick) butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup coconut oil, at room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
zest of 1 lime
unsweetened dried coconut

Combine all ingredients except dried coconut and rub together with your hands until a dough forms – it will barely hold together. Pat into a circle and wrap in plastic; stow it in the fridge for at least an hour. (I left mine in there for a week. Oops.)

Preheat to 350F. Remove dough from fridge and let warm enough to roll into a circle 1/2″ thick. Pat dried coconut into the dough and cut into any shapes you like. (Unicorns!) Bake 15 minutes and allow to cool on baking sheet 5 minutes before removing to a rack to cool completely.

I brought these to Zeke’s birthday party. Here is a picture of Zeke eating his giant birthday cupcake.

Hooray for sugar!

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Posted in baked, cookies, desserts, fruity, pantry-dependent, snacks, summer

Peanut-Ginger-Sesame Cookies

Posted on May 31, 2009 by parsnipsaplenty| 5 Comments

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I have an announcement. Are you sitting down?

The sun has been shining in Portland for 10 straight days.

It’s been amazing.

I was lolling on the grass one sunny day in college, Back East, and my friend Natalie, who grew up here in Portland, turned to me and said, “I’m from Oregon. We don’t really trust the sun.”

“Well, I sure as shit ain’t moving there,” I said to myself.

But 8 years later, here I am, and after my first northwest winter, I’ve joined the club. I get out of the house the moment the clouds thin, because I know that blue skies won’t be the case for long. When the sun can’t decide whether or not to come out during the day, however, and we get clouds-sun-clouds-sun, I think, “Oh, just let it be cloudy and let’s be done with it.”

Last weekend, though, I dug out spaghetti straps, linen dresses, and tube tops from the back of my closet. After a week and a half of this weather, I think it’s going to hang around for a little while. My pasty winter skin has gone away and I feel like a normal human being again! It’s been picnics aplenty here in Stumptown and today was no exception. Sesame cookies and seitan bánh mì with a rockstar dipping sauce from Veganomicon were in hand as Ravi and I walked to the park; we munched away on our tasty sandwiches and sugar while feeling summer coming on stronger by the minute. Let’s just hope the sun sticks around for awhile.

The bánh mì didn’t last long enough to get a decent picture, so I’ll focus on the cookies. The hardest part of vegan baked goods is getting the texture right for those of us who grew up on egg-leavened treats. These cookies nail it. And they do it without flaxseed, a hippie-food favorite that my body just doesn’t tolerate. Brown rice syrup, peanut butter, and equal amounts of baking powder and baking soda pull together the right mouthfeel; the spices and wandering hint of almond extract makes a wonderful balance. Plus, pretty!

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Peanut-Ginger-Sesame Cookies
from Veganomicon by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero
makes 42 cookies

2 1/4 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 cup nonhydrogenated vegan shortening, softened
1/2 cup chunky peanut butter
1/4 cup brown rice syrup
1 1/4 cups sugar, plus additional sugar for rolling
1/2 cup soy milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
5 ounces candied ginger, diced finely
1/3 cup each white and black sesame seeds, or 2/3 cup of just one kind

Preheat to 350F and lightly grease two cookie sheets.

Sift together flour, baking powder, soda, salt, ground ginger, and cinnamon, and set aside.

In a large bowl use electric beaters to cream the shortening until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the peanut butter, rice syrup, sugar, soy milk, and extracts, and continue to beat until creamy, 4-5 minutes. Using a rubber spatula or wooden spoon, stir in the flour mixture, then add chopped candied ginger and stir until a very firm dough forms. You can use your hands towards the end to mix the dough.

Roll scant tablespoons of the dough into walnut-sized balls. Roll each ball in sesame seeds, then roll in a little sugar and place on a prepared cookie sheet, leaving about 1 1/2″ of space between each cookie. Flatten the balls just slightly and bake for 10-11 minutes for chewy cookies, up to 14 minutes for firmer, crunchier cookies. Remove from oven and allow cookies to remain on baking sheets for a few minutes before transferring to wire racks to cool.

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Posted in baked, cookies, desserts, middle eastern, pantry-dependent, snacks, spring, summer, vegan

Picnic. With basil.

Posted on May 23, 2009 by parsnipsaplenty| 4 Comments

It’s 7:00 on a Saturday evening. I had plans – I was going to go contra dancing, twirling and stomping and grinning for three hours. But they have been thwarted by sunshine.

I was worried that this would happen when I decided that I would spend the afternoon lazing about on a grassy knoll. A few hours of soaking up the Vitamin D really takes it out of you. We walked back in the house, plopped down on the couch, and I asked myself, “Do I really, really feel like dancing?” And I’m still on the couch, two hours later, having not even gotten up to wash the sunscreen off my face. The dance is starting now. I think I might make it to the laundry room, but no farther.

This morning, Zeke came over and we walked over to the farmers’ market to stand in a 3-mile long line for biscuits. I understand that you’re not supposed to be able to find good biscuits north of the Mason-Dixon Line – or west of Tennessee, for that matter – but Pine State Biscuits knows what they’re doing. My friend Luke, who moved to Oregon from North Carolina a few months after I did, went behind the counter to hug all the cooks after ordering the Reggie last weekend. (Also, they have Cheerwine, which I miss, but not enough to pay $2 a bottle.)

So after some sweet biscuit love, Zeke headed to French class and I headed into the kitchen to make some picnic preparations. There was a feeding frenzy at the strawberry stand over at the market, so I grabbed a pint, and I also picked up the last bunch of basil from a neighboring vendor. This and a little drizzle of real balsamic gave me basil-wrapped strawberries. Three ingredients. Welcome to summer.

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After that I threw some Puy lentils together with olive oil, the same real balsamic, salt and pepper, red scallions, plenty more basil, herbs de provence, a big pinch of lavender, and a couple of splashes of lemon juice.

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Next was a simple, no-frills pasta salad: broccoli, parmesan, basil (what? It was a big bunch), olive oil, red wine vinegar, salt and pepper, and roasted garlic.

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Finally, I melted a little Earth Balance in a pan and chopped up about 5 stalks of rhubarb. Cooked it down with more brown sugar than my teeth will forgive me for, a handful of raisins, some cinnamon, allspice, and cloves, and poured some Cointreau over it for good measure. When it got all mushy, I had rhubarb compote. Plus bread and goat cheese? You’ve got yourself a picnic.

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We packed it all up, along with some Thai iced tea and blood orange soda, into sexy sexy Tupperware and went up to Washington Park, finding the perfect spot of grass in Hoyt Arboretum. We munched on our riches while watching sun-ecstatic Portlanders engage in such stimulating activities as playing hackey sack and rolling down a giant hill. Urban hikers walked past; children scuttled about, parents in tow; couples meandered by; amateur botanists pontificated within earshot. Zeke and I, meanwhile, raised forks to mouths and chewed in harmony with birdsong. Then we sat, in the sun, and did absolutely nothing. And it was wonderful.

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Posted in appetizers, desserts, fruity, major food porn, no recipes, pasta, salads, sides, snacks, spring, summer, under 5 ingredients, vegan

Risotto Cakes

Posted on April 9, 2009 by parsnipsaplenty| 1 Comment

I left the country for the first time when I was 16, on a three-week school trip to Paris. I haven’t much looked back. Five continents visited, three foreign countries lived in, four languages studied, and I’m starting to wonder if I’ll never feel well-rounded or satisfactorily traveled.

The more I cook, the more I pay attention to food in the places I’ve been. It’s been Italy that keeps coming back to me, though, for recipeless cooking – I spent four months there and learned a ton about throwing stuff in a pan, more by osmosis than by any study of cuisine. My favorite trick, by far, is the risotto cake.

I learned this in Venice. I spent a few days there near the beginning of my time in Italy, and when I was trying to decide how I should finish up the two empty weeks I had before getting on my flight back to the U.S., Venice kept pulling me back. I know the arguments against it – it’s an open sewer filled with rotting buildings, topped off by pickpockets and souvenir stalls. I was wary of all of these things before I went, and dubious at any chance of a positive experience as my train from Verona rolled through the marsh in February drizzle. We left the land, though, and barbershop poles poking up through the water tugged at the corners of my mouth. I stepped off the train and out of the station and there I was, on the Grand Canal, and I immediately loved Venice. I have never left. I stayed with a friend of a friend who fed me simple, perfect food, and when she made risotto cakes, my 20-year-old’s pride hid my enthusiastic surprise at the ingenious idea. I won’t give you a recipe, because she didn’t give me one either.

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Take some leftover risotto. Add an egg. Mix it up, make into patties (about 3-4 tablespoons’ worth), fry in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. The only trick is to wait long enough before flipping them – if you do it too soon, they’ll fall apart. Wait until you see a healthy brown crust forming on the bottom, then turn them.

This is a great post-dinner-party brunch. At least, that’s how I made it this week.

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Posted in breakfast, snacks, spring, under 5 ingredients

Tagged

Cranberry-Orange Cornbread with Five-Spice Glaze

Posted on November 10, 2008 by parsnipsaplenty| 7 Comments

A few months ago, I mentioned my love for Crescent Dragonwagon, a self-professed “closet vegetarian” for years who finally outed herself in her wonderful cookbooks.  She’s done a lot to influence the way I think about food, and has much to do with my refusal to see vegetarianism as a limitation.

So imagine my surprise when I saw that she had commented on the entry!  She had her publishers send me a promo copy of her newest book, The Cornbread Gospels, and while I think it is indeed possible to beat a single food item into the ground, I trust Crescent to make anything well.  I finally cracked it open last week, to make her Cornmeal-Oatmeal Cranberry-Orange Loaf.  The bread itself was definitely above average, cakey and moist and everything it should be in Crescent’s magical kitchen, but I was astonished to see that the recipe called for orange zest without making use of the orange juice that would be left over!

Well, I said to myself, we’ll just fix that.

So I made this glaze and holy cannoli, it’s amazing.  I understand that part of the point of having a food blog is to toot one’s own horn, and I try not to do that too much, but, really, I am a GENIUS.  I had my doubts when this stuff first started heating up on the stove – the five-spice powder + Cointreau was a bit overpowering – but once it started to thicken, any sharpness mellowed and I considered buying a funnel so that I could just pour it directly down my throat.  That method, however, would neglect the cornbread itself, with which this goes brilliantly.  I’ll mention that all of the measurements for the glaze should end with “or so”, since I added a bit of this and a sprinkle of that. All raves aside, I can say no more other than that you really need to drop whatever you’re doing and make this.  You know, now.

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Cranberry-Orange Cornbread with Five-Spice Glaze
adapted, and in some cases, directly copied, from a recipe by Crescent Dragonwagon

vegetable oil cooking spray
1 1/2 cups unbleached white flour
1/3 cup stone-ground yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
3 tablespoons mild vegetable oil
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons buttermilk (I used half milk and half yogurt)
finely grated zest of 1 orange – save the juice!
1 cup cranberries, washed, picked over, and coarsely chopped
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/4 cup rolled oats

Preheat the oven to 350F. Coat an 8″x8″ pan with oil. Sift together flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt into a large bowl. In a separate bowl whisk together eggs, oil, buttermilk, and orange zest. In a third bowl combine cranberries, pecans, and oatmeal. Sprinkle a tablespoon of flour mixture over them, and toss well.

Quickly combine flour mixture and egg mixture, using as few strokes as possible. Gently stir in the cranberry mixture. The batter should be stiff. Spoon batter into prepared pan and bake 45-55 minutes. Check two-thirds of the way through the baking period; if the loaves are browning excessively, tent them loosely with foil.

Let the baked bread cool for 10 minutes in the pan, then run a thin knife around the edge of the pan and turn the loaf out. Drizzle with glaze: in a saucepan, combine…

1/2 cup powdered raw sugar (I used Mexican sugar)
juice from the orange you zested
a splash of Cointreau
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder

Bring to a boil and cook, stirring constantly, until reduced to a thick glaze. (This will go fast – watch it!) Pour it on, baby.

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Posted in autumn, baked, breakfast, desserts, fruity, pantry-dependent, quickbreads, snacks, wintery

The Best Avocado Sandwich Ever

Posted on November 1, 2008 by parsnipsaplenty| 5 Comments

I’m writing up a post on sweet potato-corn chowder, but I couldn’t let this sandwich go unheralded.  So here’s a short intermission: If I ate this every day until I died, I’d be happy.  Red or white onions are fine.  I used a toasted English muffin, but I’ve yet to put this on any kind of bread that didn’t work.

It’s half a sliced avocado, an ounce of cream cheese, a few thin slices of onion, and mango chutney.

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Posted in sandwiches, snacks, under 5 ingredients

Roasted Eggplant-Pepper Salad (Кьопоолу)

Posted on October 6, 2008 by parsnipsaplenty| 9 Comments

One of the first Bulgarian language sessions we ever had was on food.  We learned how to say, “I like honey” and “I don’t like honey.”  We learned the words for butter (краве масло), milk (прясно мляко), tomatoes (домати), apples (ябълки).  Before long, we were reading menus with aplomb and bumbling through restaurant orders like true expats.  We learned that you don’t much use conditional tenses to be polite – none of this, “Could I get…?”  It’s just “For me, the fish.”  If you’re really sweet, you say please.  My Bulgarian friends would laugh at us Americans who would always emphasize the wrong syllable in “banitsa” and who had to be trained in toning down on the thank yous.  (Lots of places think that “thank you” should be reserved for cases of extreme gratitude.)

My Bulgarian food vocabulary god to be pretty good, especially after working on a cookbook that circulated among volunteers, with a glossary of food terms at the back.  For example, I’ll never be able to dislodge from my poor brain the translation of fenugreek.  (Сминдух.)  Think of the useful fact that could take the place of сминдух!  Quantum physics?  Sorry, out of room.  Сминдух stays.

One word that always tripped me up, though, was кьопоолу.  I’d see it on a menu and frankly, it terrified me.  As soon as I opened my mouth in front of any waitress I was at a disadvantage because she’d hear my accent and know I needed her careful ear; I didn’t want the added emotional expense of having these unctuous syllables piling up around my tongue.  Pointing to the fatal word on the menu and asking the simple question, “What is this?”  No!  Too much to bear!  Could I please have the fries please please?  Thank you.  Insert giant American smile of flustered confusion.

Finally, a year in, I was talking with a Bulgarian friend and asked him what he’d done that weekend.

“I made кьопоолу,” he said.

“Huh?” I said.

“Кьопоолу.” he said.  Then he pronounced it very patiently and carefully for me.  KYO-po-loo.  Then – then! – he told me what it was.  And I’ve ordered it from every menu I’ve seen it on since.  You can tell it’s going to be good when you smell the eggplants being grilled as you walk in the restaurant.

Кьопоолу – kyopolu – is considered a salad to Bulgarians, but it’s more of a chunky sauce in the American lexicon, great on crostini.  It’s really just roasted vegetable heaven, is all, but without any of that slime that one may consider at the thought of room-temperature roasted veggies.  Don’t go overboard with fresh garlic – it only needs the kick of one clove.  (Don’t worry; you’re putting a whole head of roasted garlic in there, so you won’t be lacking.)  You can’t eat just one bite of this stuff.  It’s addictive.  Mediterranean crack, I like to call it.

You might want to make double.

Roasted Eggplant-Pepper Salad (Кьопоолу)
makes about 1 1/2 cups

1 red bell pepper, roasted and peeled
6 finger-sized eggplants, roasted and peeled
1 head garlic, roasted and peeled, plus one fresh clove garlic, minced
1/4 cup minced parsley
2 tablespoons olive oil

Put everything but the olive oil down on a big cutting board and chop it up together pretty finely. (See picture.) Put in a bowl, add olive oil and stir gently, then let sit for at least 30 minutes. Serve at room temperature on bread spread with soft goat cheese, or maybe a little tofutti cream cheese.

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Posted in appetizers, neo-bulgo, salads, snacks, summer, under 5 ingredients, vegan

End of Summer Bean Salad

Posted on September 28, 2008 by parsnipsaplenty| 2 Comments

Well, it’s been quite a rowdy couple of weeks!  For some reason, I didn’t expect to be that stressed out during the week that I both started a new career and moved into my apartment in a new town.  Total blood pressure rocket!  Who knew?

So I cook now for a living.  I’m definitely at the bottom of the totem pole, but I’m at a good place, with good people around me who are patient and encouraging, so while the job is far from easy, it’s feeling right so far.  And right is all I need.  I’m still having the occasional “What on earth am I doing in this country?” but I’ve been finding ways to get through those moments, and things are rolling along.

I’ve got the weekend off, and so far, I haven’t really left the house.  Not even for the farmers’ market eight blocks away.  This morning I slept in, read a magazine that told me how to organize every facet of my sorry existence, and put garlic, beets, and squash in the oven to roast for later eats.  I also threw some white beans in to soak and thought about how I never would have had the patience to soak dry beans before I left for Peace Corps.  Tonight I cooked the beans through and tossed them together with the odds and ends of jars left over from a wedding shower my roommate had thrown for her sister last weekend.

For many years, I considered a bean salad something to be avoided at potlucks.  They were canned kidney beans mixed with overcooked green beans, saturated with Italian dressing.  It kept on showing up in buffets everywhere I went, and it continued to win only an averted gaze from my roving eyes.  It wasn’t until I lived in Bulgaria that I finally gave in and tried cold tart white beans (which, in Bulgarian, are called “bob”.  That was one of the first Bulgarian words that I learned, and still one of my favorites) – and, lo and behold, they were tasty!  Not mush, not loaded with chemically-thickened dressing or, heaven forbid, ketchup.  Ever since, I’ve been a big fan, and whenever I put beans on to soak, I expect that I’ll end up making a little salad with at least a few of them.

So here’s a great fridge dump white bean salad.  No, you don’t get measurements.  Trust yourself.  If you don’t have some of the ingredients, use something else.  Root through the chill chest.  Brazenly.  If you’ve got a balance between mellow, fresh, and tart, you’ll be safe.

In a bowl combine a few handfuls of cooked white beans with some diced red onion, the cloves of a head of roasted garlic (squeeze ‘em out like toothpaste), a few capers, some chopped canned artichoke hearts, a handful of halved cherry tomatoes, five or six quartered mini mozzarella balls (bocconcini), six or seven trimmed halved green beans, a little chiffonaded basil, a little chopped parsley, and a couple of glugs each of rice wine vinegar and decent olive oil.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Eat – with bread, if you’ve got it.

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Posted in salads, snacks, summer