Weekly Dish

Did you have black-eyed peas and cabbage for your New Year’s meal? We did — twice, in fact; once, prepared by some friends who invited us over on the actual first, and Thursday too, because I had already bought the fixings for the traditional peas, cabbage, and cornbread.

This might sound strange to those who know me well, as I have never been a lover of either peas or cabbage. I have learned to fix them to my liking, though, mostly because my husband loves them so — the cabbage, I braise with a green apple and red onion, while the peas get a more Tex-Mex treatment: garlic, jalapeno, cumin, and chile powder. Perhaps not as traditional as it could be, but a definite improvement for me and my finicky relationship with both legumes and cruciferous vegetables.

Even if I have learned to like them this way, the whole time I was braising the cabbage and stirring the peas this year, I couldn’t stop thinking about salad. Oh, yes, it was in the twenties outside, frigid for this part of the world, even in January. And I enjoyed my hot meal of cabbage, peas, and cornbread, which we topped with poached eggs, just fine. After it was over, though, I was still thinking about what those ingredients would taste like in salad form, despite the chill in the air.

So salad it was, for dinner last night, a panzanella of sorts, modified with southern ingredients, particularly those considered lucky to eat on the first of the year. The pepper jelly vinaigrette softened the cornbread croutons and jazzed up the cabbage, while the goat cheese melted into the creamy peas in a way I wouldn’t have expected (I’m imagining the peas in dip form, blended with goat cheese…) to make a salad that was surprisingly tasty. In case you have some of these spare parts rumbling around in your fridge, post-New Year’s, here’s a delicious way to use them up. And it just might make you doubly lucky to boot.

New Year’s Cornbread Panzanella with Hot Pepper Jelly Vinaigrette

These proportions will make two dinner-sized salad. If you have a heartier eater on your hands, I think bacon or ham would work well to up the caloric anty; a poached or fried egg would also sit nicely atop this meal.

2 cups cornbread, cut into cubes
Olive oil
1 cup black-eyed peas*, cooked and cooled
1 T. red onion, finely chopped
2 cups green cabbage, sliced into ribbons
1 ounce goat cheese
Hot Pepper Jelly Vinaigrette (recipe follows)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Toss the cornbread cubes with olive oil and toast them in the hot oven for about 20 minutes (or as long as it takes to chop everything else and mix up the dressing).

To assemble: lay the cabbage ribbons in a single layer on two plates. Top each pile of cabbage with cornbread croutons, peas, and red onion. Divide the goat cheese into two equal portions, and crumble it on top of each salad. Drizzle with dressing.

*I used frozen peas that had been cooked in water for about 25 minutes, but I think leftover peas, cooked as you like them, would work too.

Hot Pepper Jelly Vinaigrette

1 clove garlic, minced
3 T. hot pepper jelly
1/4 cup cider vinegar
Squeeze of lemon
1/4 cup olive oil
Salt, to taste

Whisk together the garlic, pepper jelly, vinegar, and lemon. Pour in the oil in a slow steady stream, whisking vigorously until well-incorporated. Salt to your liking.

This summer, my sister came to stay with us. Nine years my junior, Elizabeth is the baby of our family; our two brothers occupy the middle territory, sisters flanked on either end. That makes me the oldest. By the time baby number four came along, my parents were well into the throes of a life structured around sporting seasons: our white mini-van scooted from one field to the next, and later, one town to the next, as my brothers batted and kicked and threw their way through boyhood and on into adolescence.

So, soon after my eighth birthday, when my mom announced that a baby was on the way, I faithfully knelt beside my bed every night and prayed for a sister. Now, as is true of most siblings I’m sure, there were certainly days I understood why people often said you should be careful what you wish for. Especially as I ventured into the teenage years with a toddler close on my heels, prying into my make-up cabinet, my telephone conversations, and my many purses, I often wondered what in the world I’d been thinking. Compounding the dissonance caused by our age gap, she moved into my room right about the time I started high school. She was seven, went to bed early, and wanted to sleep as bodily close to me as possible. I was sixteen, cultivating a fierce independence, and wanted nothing more than to be left alone.

Then, I left for college, and somewhere along the way, we became the greatest of friends. We’ve tried to retrace our steps, to figure out where and how we made the transition, but now, it’s hard for me to remember a time we didn’t talk often about any and everything.

When she decided that she wanted to be around for the first few months of my daughter’s life, I was delighted. When she said she’d also like to learn her way around the kitchen while she was here, I was even more excited. David and I have taken turns teaching her what we know and what we like to make — she and David have made biscuits, loaves and loaves of bread, scones of several kinds, and stacks of cookies. My contributions to her culinary prowess tend to lean more towards the dinner side of things: at my request, she’s made risotto, crab cakes, shrimp scampi, and scads of salads. She’s gotten better at slicing and dicing, become quite adept at simply dressing a salad, and learned her way around a frying pan.

Mostly, though, she’s cultivating her taste in food, which, as far as I can tell, is one of the best ways to ensure success in the kitchen: to know what tastes good. She comes back from our grocery store with a pungent, creamy wedge of blue cheese and a crisp apple, or slices up an avocado and tops it with a squeeze of lemon and a good handful of salt. True, when it comes down to the doing, she’s more baker and I’m more cook — she’s precise and measured to my haphazard and experimental. But what we share is a love of simple, fresh ingredients, enhanced by other simple, fresh ingredients, and that means that either of us can go into the kitchen and whip up a quick snack or meal that the other one will love.

This salad requires neither great skill nor great know-how, but I have to tell you, when Elizabeth and I threw it together as one of the last summer lunches we’d share, it felt like a most fitting end to the time we’d invested in sharing kitchen space.

What remains true for me — and one of the things I love most about cooking — is that the creation of food means the creation of memories. When Josie is older and I tell her stories of her first summer in this world, those stories will involve Harry Potter, her dad’s manic baking, her Aunt Elizabeth at the stove, and a kitchen full of love and laughter.

And that, friends, is what summers, kitchens, and sisters are made for.

A word about salads and dressings: every cook certainly has her salad preferences, and I tend to be rather finicky about mine. I like the greens salted, rather than the dressing (so no salt in my dressing recipe). And, I’d just as soon have as much “topping” as greens, so the fruit/vegetable/cheese combination carries its fair share of weight. Also, I prefer a tangy dressing to an oily one, so my proportions may seem a bit off. Most vinaigrette recipes call for twice as much oil as vinegar, but that’s too much oil for my taste. Adjust as you see fit.

Sisters Summer Salad

Salad greens, to cover two plates
1 peach, diced
1 avocado, diced
2 handfuls sea salt
A healthy smattering of cracked black pepper
2 ounces of creamy blue cheese
Balsamic vinaigrette (recipe follows)

Lay half of the peach and avocado on each bed of greens; sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper (the cracked pepper really makes this salad — don’t skip this step!) Scatter the blue cheese atop each salad and drizzle with vinaigrette. Enjoy with someone you love a lot (like your sister).

Simple Balsamic Vinaigrette

1/4 cup good balsamic vinegar
2 T. honey
1/3 cup olive oil

Whisk the vinegar and honey vigorously to incorporate. Drizzle the oil slowly into the vinegar mixture, whisking all the while.

Because my daughter’s arrival coincided with the end of the semester (literally—I gave my final exam in the morning and went into labor that evening), I didn’t have much of a chance to wind down as I usually do, throwing myself into the kitchen and cooking furiously, in celebration of the time to do so.

No, instead, I started off my summer break with a newborn, not exactly prime conditions for having huge blocks of time to spend dawdling in the kitchen as I so pleased. But sweet little Josie did enter this world going to bed at a reasonable hour and staying asleep for a good while, which meant that once we got her to sleep, I could prepare dinner undisturbed. Not that I had a lot of energy for dinner, especially in those first few weeks, but I did itch to do something productive besides feed a baby.

So, I turned to the Farmer’s Market for inspiration and set about thinking how to accommodate our new schedule — what could be started early in the day or the night before and finished without too much time and effort after the baby was asleep? Well, salad, for starters.

And, salad worked so well that we have eaten an awful lot of it since Josie’s been in our life. I have a few basic combinations that I tweak here and there depending on what we have lying around. But since I had promised myself I’d try at least one new thing in the kitchen each week, I needed a significant variation on our old green stand-by. Shrimp are abundant and relatively inexpensive at our market this time of year, so we buy them fairly regularly. The little ones we ended up with a few weeks ago were begging to land atop some greens, so I boiled them and marinated them a day ahead of time to make easy work of assembling dinner the next night.

The idea for the marinade comes from Sara Foster, who calls these “Pickled Shrimp” because of the spice combination used to flavor them. Reminiscent of bread and butter pickles, the tangy-sweet marinade doubled as a dressing for our shrimp-topped salad. Next time, I’ll reduce the amount of sugar and marinate some vegetables along with the shrimp for an even quicker and healthier dinner assembly.

Now that I’ve gotten into the cooking groove, if I could only find some time to write about the things I make, then it wouldn’t take me 3 weeks to compose one post. At least I am finally planning our menus again (as you can see below); funny how the little things at this point seem like such big accomplishments!

What does help me to be motivated, I have to say, is all the encouragement from you sweet people who read this blog. It means much to me that after my long silences, some of you still return with heartwarming well wishes for me and my family. Especially for your kind words about Josie, I thank you.

Shrimp Scampi

Steak and cheese sandwiches

(recipe for shrimp after the jump)

(more…)

This super-fast dinner was inspired by a post by Barbara at Tigers & Strawberries (who just gave birth to a gorgeous baby girl!) about using leftovers for breakfast. I read somewhere recently (and in true mid-semester fashion, can’t remember for the life of me where) that a hash is typically a meal made from leftover potatoes. Which certainly makes sense to anyone who’s every tried to make hash browns with raw potatoes: it can take forever. In light of my recent fascination with using up leftovers, the specifics of this dish were inspired by a ziploc bag full of sweet potatoes roasted the night before and a hankering for breakfast at dinner time (which strikes often, since I love breakfast food, but am not much of a morning cook).

Everything for this meal happens in one skillet, which my clean-up crew appreciates, and the salad greens give this old-fashioned high-fat breakfast more healthful clothing for dinner. I love the way the runny egg yolk becomes part of the dressing; once everything on this plate is all mixed up, each bite is packed with a zingy mixture of flavors. Next time, I’ll use spinach arugula instead of Romaine.

The recipe follows this week’s menu (I need a new dry-erase marker; sorry if it’s hard to read!).

Sweet Potato Hash Salad

4 slices thick bacon
1 cup cooked, chopped sweet potatoes
1 T. Dijon mustard
1 T. cane syrup (honey would also work)
2 T. cider vinegar
Two platefuls of salad greens
2 eggs

Cook bacon slices in a skillet until cooked to desire crispness. Remove and drain off all but about a teaspoon of the fat. Add the sweet potatoes to the skillet, and toss gently, browning as you cook.

Meanwhile, line two plates with the salad greens.

When the potatoes are fairly evenly browned, add the mustard and syrup and stir to mix well. Add the vinegar, stirring constantly, until all ingredients are well-incorporated. Divide the sweet potato mixture between the two plates.

Return the skillet to the heat, and fry two eggs, topping each plate with one of them. Finish each plate with two slices of the reserved bacon.

To eat, mix everything on the plate together thoroughly.

Reheated fish is just not to my liking. The texture is all wrong, and somehow the flavors sharpen unpleasantly in the refrigerator. When I make paneed tilapia, I like to make fish cakes with the leftovers, and cakes would work well with salmon too. But because we’d grilled a whole slab of salmon, I needed something that would last more than just one meal. My guess is that reheated fish cakes wouldn’t be so appetizing either.

So I made salad instead. The combination of salmon, dill, red onion, and capers is a common one, and I added a simple yogurt dressing flavored with lemon and feta cheese. The first night, I served the salad on toasted whole grain bread with rosemary potatoes on the side. For lunch the next day, the salmon salad sat atop a bed of spinach, dressed in a touch of lemon juice and olive oil. Both preparations worked well, and the best part is, once you have leftover salmon, little effort is required to make at least two meals.
Salmon Salad

Juice of 1 lemon
1/4 cup fresh dill, minced plus extra for garnish
*1/2 cup plain yogurt (I used nonfat)
2 ounces feta cheese, crumbled
1/2 t. Kosher salt
Leftover salmon (I used about a pound)
1/4 small red onion, minced
2 T. capers, drained

In the bowl of a food processor, combine the lemon juice, dill, yogurt, feta, and salt. Pulse a few times until well combined. In a large bowl, break up the salmon into chunks. Add the red onion and capers and toss to mix. Add dresssing and mix until the salad is moist enough for your liking. Serve on toasted whole grain bread or mound on a bed of spinach. This recipe made enough for 2 dinner-sized portions and at least 4  lunch portions.

*Note: If you want a thicker dressing, mayonnaise would probably work in place of the yogurt.

Every cook has her own version of this Italian bread and tomato salad, I’m sure, but I’ve made this one so many times this summer, I had to share. I’m not a big fan of soggy bread, so I like to get my bread cubes nice and toasty, almost like croutons, and with the help of olive oil and some fresh garlic, the bread also packs quite a punch of flavor. Add some vegetables and a quick dressing, and you’ve got yourself a light summer supper.

One trick I’ve used in carting this salad to picnics or other events is to mix the dressing in the bottom of the bowl before you add everything else. That way, you can toss the salad whenever you get ready, and not worry about everything turning to mush.

Panzanella

1 small loaf French bread, or half of a long one, cubed
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup olive oil
1/2 t. + 1/2 t. Kosher or sea salt
1 yellow bell pepper, julienned
1 cucumber, seeded and sliced into half moons
1 large tomato, seeded and cubed
1 avocado, diced
Juice of half a lemon
Coarsely ground black pepper
1/4 cup champagne vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
1 T. dijon mustard

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with foil. Coat the bread cubes with olive oil, and spread in a single layer on the baking sheet. Sprinkle with 3 cloves of the minced garlic and the Kosher salt. Toast for about 15 minutes, stirring once during toasting, about half-way through.

In the bottom of a large salad bowl, whisk together the vinegar, mustard, and the remaining clove of garlic. Slowly whisk in the olive oil, stirring constantly to emulsify. Add the tomato, bell pepper, and cucumber pieces to the bowl. Sprinkle the avocado slices with lemon juice, and add them too. Salt the vegetables with the remaining half teaspoon of salt, and with coarse black pepper, if you like. If serving immediately, you can go ahead and toss the veggies with the dressing. If you plan to wait, then don’t toss it just yet.

Add the toasted bread crumbs last, tossing to coat with the dressing just before serving.

This recipe makes enough to serve 4 for a light supper, or 6-8 as a side. Either way, just eat it all; the salad will definitely be mushy by the next day.

I have written often about my culinary heritage, particularly the influence of the composers of the Aunts’ Recipe Book, my dad’s four younger sisters. The youngest, Emily, is the only one who’s made a career out of food; for years, she ran her own catering business and is now the director of the cooking school at the Everyday Gourmet in Jackson, MS. Interestingly, my memories of her contributions to my love of food include really sugary cereals, Butterfingers, and bowls of melted cheese: when I stayed at her house as a kid, she let me eat WHATEVER I wanted.

These days she often sends me interesting specialty food items from work, for which I am constantly on the lookout for creative preparations. The most recent packages have included these gorgeous white and black beans, labeled Calypso Beans on the bag, and a bright, fruity Meyer lemon olive oil, which I have been rationing.

I had visions of a lemony salad including both gifts from Aunt Em, and a few weeks ago, I planned to make such a concoction, adding leftover grilled chicken for a substantial weeknight supper.

One of the things I love about reading other people’s food blogs is that I am constantly inspired to create new dishes. The only problem is that I find myself with vague memories of recipes I saw one place or the other, but no idea exactly where.

For instance, I knew I had somewhere read of just such a salad–with beans and a lemony dressing. But, for the life of me, I could not recall where I saw it. I did some searching and nothing looked familiar. I emailed the resident veggie expert, Alanna, to see if it was perhaps a recipe of hers. No, she replied, but she’d keep her eyes open.

And, she found it!

Of course, by the time we’d figured it out, the salad had long been made and eaten, with no guidance from a recipe, so my version looks very different from Gabriella’s.

So, why am I telling you all of this? Well, just in case you find yourself in such a predicament–a vague recollection of a recipe and no help from Google–I thought I’d share a few tips I’ve learned along the way to help me solve this organizational problem (and then the recipe for the salad).

First, Google’s Blogsearch. Alanna alerted me to this handy tool, and if you want to search for a recipe, but you only want results from bloggers, this search page will help you do just that.

Second, del.icio.us. If you’re looking for a super-easy, user-friendly way to store bookmarks to recipes online, this site might be for you. Elise at Simply Recipes posted a helpful tutorial on how to use it, and I finally got around to following her suggestions. You can see my list of recipe links here, and if you start yours, you can add me to your network and we can share. Isn’t that fun?

And now, for the bean salad! Once the beans are cooked, this is a snap to throw together. It keeps well and would be perfect for a picnic. (Not that anyone can stand to be outside around here!)

The inspiration for this recipe, it turns out, comes from Gabriella at My Life as a Reluctant Housewife, and I’m pretty sure I spied it at an ARF/5-a-day round-up at Sweetnicks. Since my version turned out much differently (since I didn’t find the recipe until after the fact), I’ll contribute this variation to this week’s Tuesday event.

Thanks to Alanna for helping me locate the recipe, to Gabriella for inspiring this creation, to Elise for the lesson about del.icio.us, to Cate for hosting ARF/5-a-day Tuesday’s every week, and to Aunt Em for the ingredients.

And who says cooking isn’t collaborative?

Calypso Bean Salad

3 cups dry calypso beans (white beans would probably work just as well)
2 cups water
1 clove garlic, quartered
2 lemons
1 t. lemon pepper
1/4 cup lemon-flavored olive oil (of course, I’m sure regular would work too)
1/2 t. Kosher salt
1 T. fresh oregano, minced
1/4 cup sundried tomatoes, chopped (it strikes me now that the first time I made this salad–and photographed it–I used fresh tomatoes; either will work)
1/2 cup artichoke hearts, chopped
1/4 cup Greek olives, minced
2 ounces feta cheese, crumbled
2 chicken breasts, sliced (optional)

Cover the beans with water and soak overnight. They should absorb most of the liquid. In a small saucepan, bring 2 cups of water to boil. Add the quartered garlic clove, the trimmings from the two lemons, a sprinkle of salt and lemon pepper, and the beans. Simmer the beans for 2-3 hours, or until they reach the consistency you like. (I’m really funny about bean texture; I don’t like them mushy, especially in a salad, so I tend to undercook them. 2 hours was a perfect texture for me.) Drain and set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk together the juice from the 2 lemons, lemon pepper, salt, and fresh oregano. Add the oil in a slow, steady stream, whisking constantly. Mix in the olives, tomatoes, artichoke hearts, and chicken if using. Toss this mixture with the beans and top with the feta. Serves 4; refrigerates well.

If you come by my house around dinner time and expect to find me slaving over a hot stove these 100-degree, humidity-laden days, you will likely be disappointed. Around here, our evenings tend to look like this: a quick, easy meal, tossed together over white wine and NPR’s Fresh Air, and then, Scrabble.

As a wordy, nerdy, (culinary) bookworm, my love of Scrabble is probably not a mystery. But I really learned to love the game from my great-grandmother, Nanny, who taught me to play. She had one of those fancy, lazy-Susan-esque boards, coated in shiny plastic with neat little cubbies for each letter, upon which she regularly dazzled me with her crossword puzzle-enhanced vocabulary.

Between turns, Nanny was always whipping up something fabulous in her tiny kitchen, so perhaps the combination of delicious food and interesting words is the legacy I’ve always been meant to inherit.

Although Nanny is sadly no longer with us, I can’t help but think she’d be pleased as punch to know that her eldest great granddaughter is carrying on the tradition of loving people through food and, at the same time, soundly defeating them at the game of words. Sorry, David, it sounds like I come by it honestly.

But look at it this way: at least I feed you well in the process.

For a Scrabble dinner date one night a few weeks ago, I put these farmer’s market sweet peppers to work in a salad with some crawfish tails, bacon, goat cheese, and a salty-sweet maple vinaigrette. The quantities are approximate, as with any salad, and the possibilities are endless. Shrimp or grilled chicken could certainly replace the crawfish, and the quantity and variety of veggies is completely up to your personal taste. However you decide to fix your salad, I highly recommend it with Scrabble on the side.

Spinach Salad with Crawfish, Goat Cheese, and Bacon-Maple Dressing

4-6 slices bacon (I like the maple-flavored kind in this salad)
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1 T. maple syrup plus a drizzle for the nuts
1 T. honey dijon mustard
1 T. balsalmic vinegar
2 T. olive oil
1 T. reserved bacon drippings
Spinach leaves
Sweet peppers (I used two), cut into matchstick-sized pieces
Goat cheese (about 2 ounces)
1 cup cooked crawfish tails (optional)

Cook the bacon in a heavy skillet until it reaches your desired doneness. Remove the slices and set aside. Drain off about a tablespoon of the drippings to reserve, and discard all but a very tiny film on the bottom. Return the skillet to medium heat and add the pecans. Stir, toasting the nuts until they are brown and fragrant. Drizzle with a tiny bit of syrup and stir to coat. Turn off the heat.

In a small bowl, whisk together the reserved bacon drippings, mustard, maple syrup, and vinegar until well-blended. Drizzle in the oil in a very slow stream, whisking constantly until the mixture emulsifies.

Cover two plates with spinach leaves. Top with the peppers, dollops of goat cheese, the toasted nuts, crumbled bacon, and the crawfish tails. Drizzle with the dressing.

The antioxidant-rich peppers and vitamin-laden spinach make this recipe a good candidate for ARF/5-a-day Tuesdays over at Sweetnicks. Head over there to see how other people are eating healthy and staying cool.

See, I knew it was a bad idea to post a menu with designated days. I never seem to stick to the chronology of a meal plan. Here’s how the switcheroo starts: I decided I wanted to have my friend Casey over for dinner one night this week because her husband is in New Orleans working on a movie for the month of May and she’s all alone. If she’d come last night, the paneed catfish would have been perfect food for company, and all would have been well. But, we didn’t catch up with one another until last night was out of the question, so at the last minute, I had to postpone the paneeing and opt for something else. Something quick too because I wanted it to be ready before the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy began (our guilty television pleasure).

Thursday’s meal slides into Monday’s spot, Monday gets bumped to Tuesday, and well, who knows what the rest of the week holds.

At any rate, the salad was simple and delicious–the pepper jelly added just the right sweet-spicy kick to a basic vinaigrette, and the combination of bacon, strawberries, and goat cheese is really hard to beat in my opinion.

I wanted to toast the goat cheese, you know, like they do in restaurants sometimes, where the top is all brown and crispy and the inside is perfectly creamy? Can someone please tell me how they do that? I tried to stick mine under the broiler (a bad idea), and I ended up with puddles, which I then had to reform into balls. They tasted good, but were not exactly what I had in mine. Next time, I’ll stick with the un-toasted cheese. And I’m sure there’s a more complicated version of Pepper Jelly Vinaigrette out there, but this simple one did the trick for this salad, and it comes together in a snap.

Strawberry Salad with Pepper Jelly Vinaigrette

For the dressing:
2 T. hot pepper jelly
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
1 t. coarse salt

Whisk the vinegar, jelly, and salt together in a bowl. Whisk in the oil, a drop at a time, until the dressing comes together.

Salad for 2:
Enough garden greens to cover two dinner plates
4 slices bacon, cooked and cut into slivers
Half pint of strawberries, washed and sliced
1/4 cup (2 ounces) goat cheese

Top the greens with the sliced strawberries, slivers of bacon, and mounds of goat cheese. Drizzle with vinaigrette and serve.

As strawberries, peppers, and greens are all rich in vitamins and anti-oxidants, this salad makes a great contribution to ARF Tuesdays at Sweetnicks.

Notes: Pepper jelly is a quintessential southern condiment. Made from the many varieties of hot peppers that grow down here, pepper jelly is served on everything from black-eyed peas to biscuits to ham. I’ve never been a huge black-eyed pea fan, but I love pepper jelly, so I was happy to find this alternate use for it. The jelly I used is made by one of the farmer’s wives at the Saturday market, but you can sometimes find commercially made pepper jelly in the condiment section of a grocery store (at least in this part of the world).

In other news: Today has been designated Save the Internet day by Chez Pim. You can read more about the threat to internet democracy here or on Pim’s site; she has a list of great resources. Instead of writing a long involved post about it, I plan to do some more research and write my congressman.

In warmer weather, I have been known to let my husband spend more time standing over the grill than I spend over the stove. I love the smoky flavor a charcoal fire imparts to meat, but I haven’t been very adventurous in my grilling of vegetables.

Last time we grilled chicken, I decided to give veggies a try. I marinated an eggplant and three portabellos in a basalmic-honey mixture, grilled them until tender, and cubed them when they were cool enough to handle. For a quick and easy side dish, I tossed the chopped vegetables with some cubes of fresh mozzarella and a basalmic vinaigrette. I loved the combination of the smoky grilled mushrooms and eggplant and the sweet-tartness of the dressing. Later, David admitted his skepticism (he’s not the world’s biggest fan of eggplant), but said he’d been pleasantly surprised by the end result.

I can imagine all sorts of additions that would make this grilled salad even better: red bell pepper, slivers of red onion, artichoke, asparagus. This version was even better the next day; I think it will serve us in the future as picnic fare or a simple make-ahead side dish.

Grilled Eggplant and Portabello Salad

1 small eggplant, quartered
3 large portabello mushrooms, halved
For the marinade:
1/2 cup basalmic vinegar
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup honey

For the dressing:
3 T. balsalmic vinegar
3 T. olive oil
2 T. honey
1/2 t. Kosher salt

1/4 pound fresh mozzarella, cubed

Mix up the marinade in a large baking dish. Add the vegetables, cut side of the vegetables down, cover, and refrigerate for at least a few hours. Turn and stir at least once, to make sure the veggies are soaking up the vinegary juices.

Grill the eggplant and mushrooms until charred and tender, over a medium-low flame, this took us about 20 minutes for the mushrooms about 40 for the eggplant. You can also cut the vegetables into smaller pieces if you like, which will help them to become tender quicker (before the outside is completely black).

Allow them to cool completely. Meanwhile, mix up the dressing in a small bowl: whisk together the honey and vinegar, and then incorporate the oil a drop at a time, whisking vigorously until the dressing emulsifies (thickens and doesn’t separate). Stir in the salt.
When the vegetables are cool, chop them into cubes and toss them with the mozzarella cubes and the dressing. Serves 4-6 as a side.

This veggie recipe is my contribution to ARF/5-a-day Tuesdays over at Sweetnicks. For more great good-for-you recipes, visit her site.