winning friends with salad
rhubarb squares and hot weather foods
We spent last weekend doing a lot of work in the garden: weeding until my lower body basically fell apart, re-seeding some things that had bolted or been used up, pruning tomato vines, and so forth. There are also a lot of volunteer plants coming up where we hadn’t planted them— the lettuce area is scattered with tomato and tomatillo plants, the tomato area has big patches of cilantro, and I found a strawberry tucked in behind a section of mint and our raspberry bush (fully the other side of the yard from where the strawberry pots are). I’m not sure whether this is the doing of birds or seeds that had hibernated in the compost bin or what, but I’m excited to witness how food grows if you leave it to its own devices, and see what comes through. It may soon be too hot to do anything except eat popsicles in the shade, but at least I can watch my tomato and squash plants grow exponentially in the coming week.
Our roommates had a small barbecue on Saturday to bid farewell to the yard as they move into their apartment, so we spent the afternoon drinking beers on the patio, eating burgers and chips and fruit, listening to music, and laughing together. Hopefully there will be more times like this to come as we attempt to re-navigate our social circles this summer.
In the evening, Jeff and I had our first trip to the movies since January of 2020, and there was palpable excitement from the other attendees while waiting in line the Rio Theatre, and when the projectionist came on the mic to welcome us back and announce the film. We watched Judas and the Black Messiah, which was amazing and devastating. And as someone who doesn’t love going to the big, busy chain theatres, I wish my moviegoing experience could always involve a theatre at less than half capacity where it’s illegal for a stranger to sit beside me. Existing in public spaces again is going to take some getting used to.
It probably hasn’t escaped any lower mainlanders how obscenely hot it’s been getting, particularly for June, and it’s about to get so much worse. Usually other places like to make fun of us for complaining about the heat when it’s, say, 27°C, but I think no matter where you live we can all agree that this “heat dome” across the west coast is both severe and worrying. Records are about to be broken across entire provinces and states as the high-pressure bank hits the west coast of North America like a hurricane. There’s much to be said about how the climate crisis is creating conditions that will (or have already) make regions unfit for human life, but I won’t get into it when we’re busy worrying in the short term about how to keep our pets cool in apartments without air conditioning and where unhoused people can go to be safe when it’s 39° outside.
Currently we, the simple fools who live here, can’t do much except try to stay hydrated, wear as little clothing as possible, and attempt to feed ourselves as best we can without actually doing any cooking. (Personally I think work should also be cancelled until we get through this, but you know how it is.) In making cold meals, you have to do a little work to find something that you’re firstly excited about eating (so, not a peanut butter and jam sandwich), and secondly that actually fills you up (so, not just half a bunch of grapes and a pickle). This week I made two salads that willingly accept this duty.
Every time I buy beets, I never have a plan for them. I just put them in the fridge and have a little post-it note in the back of my brain that says, “gotta make something with those beets” until a week or so passes and it starts blinking and making little ping noises like when your hearts are low in a Zelda game. Usually, it ends up being a roasted beet salad, warm or cold, and with different parts of it changed out depending on the season. This one is inspired by “The Avocado Matrix” page in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, a helpful chart which shows you some possibilities for making a salad with avocado as a starting point, creating various flavour profiles based on what you’ve got to work with.
Avocado, beet, and citrus all work really nicely together, so I used some bitter garden greens and a lemon vinaigrette and added feta, mint & dill, and pieces of grapefruit. It was a really refreshing salad: the lemon vinaigrette, which might be too tart on a more basic salad, works so nicely here with the sweetness of the beets and fat from the cheese and avocado. And I was actually full before I became too weary of eating salad to continue. If you like beets, this will be delicious, and if you’re not a big fan of beets, you can have this testimonial from Jeff who eats them only begrudgingly: “As far as beet salads go, this one is pretty good.”
All right, so this one doesn’t exactly fit the ‘not cooking’ requirement either because it requires multiple things to be blanched, fried, or boiled, but this can be done in a cooler part of the day and saved for later, and blessedly, you still get to eat it cold. After making the perfect crispy fried chickpeas last week, I was searching for an opportunity to make them again. Because I also had red potatoes and green beans from the dollar rack at the produce store, I thought they could be nice addition to a Niçoise-style salad. We picked arugula, endive, and butter lettuce from the garden, and used tarragon dijon mustard to make an intensely flavoured vinaigrette with garlic, lemon, capers, and chives. I think this dressing would be really nice for more basic side salads too, and other potato or grain salads. Although tuna and boiled eggs are commonly used in a Niçoise, with the chickpeas as a vegetarian component you could forgo the egg altogether to make it vegan, or use slices of smoked tofu for an additional element of flavour and texture.
I blanched the green beans for about two and a half minutes and they came out perfectly, and then used the same water to cook the potatoes. Unfortunately I started doing other prep while they were cooking and forgot to set a timer, so they ended up overdone and did not look firm they way you’d hope they would for salad purposes. I added the dressing to them separately and then piled them on top of the rest of the salad so as not to ruin the appearance by getting starchy potato bits all over everything. I love the varied components of this salad— sweet crunchy green beans, tender lettuces, juicy little tomatoes, briny olives, boiled eggs sprinkled with salt— and with the potatoes in their tangy dressing and crisp salty chickpeas on top, it feels really substantial without becoming heavy the way a creamier potato salad might in the heat. Reflect upon its beauty (and pretend you do not see the overcooked potatoes).
I had rhubarb in the produce bin once again, but didn’t have the energy to make a pie. Instead I opted for these strawberry-rhubarb crisp bars from Smitten Kitchen that are sort of like a mix between a fruity granola bar and an oatmeal cookie— not too soft, not too sweet. I didn’t mix it in the pan like in the recipe; I used bowls because the feeling of mixing things in a baking vessel makes me way more upset than having to wash a bunch of dishes. But if something creating many dishes to wash later is preventing you from baking, have at it!
This only took 30 minutes in the oven, and chilling them in the fridge as the recipe suggests is really what gives the bottom layer the firmness and crunch you want from something that is more cookie and less crumble. They’re very nice by themselves as a snack or post-dinner treat, but as with most desserts, they’re also fabulous with a scoop of ice cream. Sadly this did not come even close to using the pound and a half of rhubarb I received, so I’m back to square one.
Now that tomatoes you can buy at the store actually have flavour again, I’ve been returning to tomato-cheese toasts with chaat masala for breakfast when I’m at home. This week I had some super juicy and sweet BC hot house grape tomatoes, and 2-year aged cheddar. I also got a bag of slightly overripe campari and roma tomatoes from the dollar rack, and turned them into a garlicky pasta sauce with basil and arugula. I’m a fan of blanching tomatoes for about a minute (to easily remove the skins) before making them into sauce, so that the texture is more even. This time after skinning and seeding the tomatoes, I crushed them by hand instead of blending them so that they’d break down in the pan for a slightly rustic but not too chunky sauce. And as a bonus, the blanching water can be used to cook the pasta once the sauce is almost ready.
Media:
I love witnessing drama, so of course I enjoyed reading this piece by Dayna Evans for Eater about the erasure of women who popularized no-knead bread techniques before the days of Jim Lahey and Mark Bittman. Lahey’s recipe, or Bittman’s interpretation of it, is the one that many of us bread novices turned to at the start of the pandemic for its simplicity, never really thinking about where the need or desire for a thing like bread you don’t have to spend a lot of time and effort making might have come from.
The article explores the complexity of recipe creation and ownership: although it isn’t really possible for any one person to ‘claim’ techniques as ancient as that of how one makes bread, it is notable who gets to profit from the marketing of them. In other words, “who gets to be a revolutionary.”
“Throughout the history of bread-baking, female bakers toiled in domestic settings, making bread for their families (or white women’s families), a fact that people like Michael Pollan have often encouraged home cooks to romanticize. “Don’t eat anything your great-great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” Pollan says, forgetting the often hidden unpaid labor that women and people of color had to perform for generations to get that kind of food on the table. The lionizing of domestic recipes tends to happen when they are translated into a mainstream professional sphere, frequently by male chefs.”
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort. Once again this week I encourage you if you’re a settler and you can spare it, to please donate to the Indian Residential School Survivors Society or the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. Finally, here’s the mantra for the heat wave this weekend. Stay safe out there.