I'd Like To Phone My Olives?

I'm always looking for easy ways to make simple dishes more interesting and pack in a little more volume. But I needn't look too far, as one of my all time favorite foods – olives – are often the perfect flavor punch for a simple dish. Specifically, garlic-cured olives. You can get them at most supermarkets now in the fresh olive bar section. Plus, you can usually buy as many or as few as you'd like at a very reasonable bulk price. Julia and I have some in our fridge almost all the time, and their garlicky, salty, crunchy milieu add much to our everyday cooking.

Check out a recent example:

Two days ago, Julia requested a light and tasty salad for dinner. I decided to use some black beans as a protein/fiber source and rinsed and drained a can and then heated them with seasoning on the stove for a few minutes. I also toasted some crunched up Ramen noodles with some cooking spray and salt. Once both cooled down, I added them to some mixed greens with some minced red onion. And already, a nice, tasty, crunchy, simple salad that could be an entree. But it needed dressing and it needed that extra punch to make it really delicious. So I made a simple vinaigrette into a garlic olive vinaigrette. I chopped about eight garlic olives and put them back in the remaining garlic and oil and then added a little additional extra virgin olive oil, a tablespoon of white wine vinegar, salt, pepper, three dashes of Tabasco and a tablespoon of Dijon mustard. After shaking it vigorously it was thick and amazing tasting. A great, deep mix of flavors with the olives, garlic, horseradish, Tabasco all melding well. This addendum made the salad completely pop, and neither of us could stop eating it. It was such an easy dinner, I'm gonna be making it all the time!

Bonus: the very next night Julia surprised me with an awesome component to dinner: a bruschetta loaded with tomatoes and garlic olives on an herb baguette with a light spreading of goat cheese. It was incredibly tasty and you guessed it – those olives and their punch really put the dish over the top.

So it's good to remember a lifeline ingredient like these olives that can allow simple cooking with huge, delicious flavors. When I'm in a pinch, I use my lifeline and phone my olives every time.

Famous Crunchy Asian Salad

You ever have a dish that you know exactly how it tastes and feels and looks but have no idea how to get there and make it yourself? Often times, intuition, logic and experience can help recreate a dish. But there's a definite luck element as well. This week when I tried to create Julia's Mom's famous Asian salad that I've been craving, I couldn't resist the urge to try to recreate it. And whether it was luck or not, it came out great, even with a few twists I added. So much so that I completely impressed her daughter with a live, authentic and surprise taste of Mama's kitchen from afar – with only my guesses and memories to help me.

The base of the dish is my favorite kind of cabbage to consume raw – Chinese/Napa cabbage. It's not too strongly flavored and is very crisp; shredding a small to medium sized head is enough for 3 to 4 servings of this super salad. After shredding the cabbage, I zested and juiced a lime over it and added a little pinch of salt and pepper. I then finely minced a little less than half of a small yellow onion and four garlic chives and added them into the salad base. I also threw in one small, deseeded tomato, minced.

The next and perhaps most important element of the salad is the crunch. This involves toasting/browning a bunch of different great crunchy elements. I tried to remember them all and ended up throwing in a few more new ones I thought of along the way. I heated a pan to medium with a little olive oil, salt and pepper. I then added a little more than a quarter cup of bulgur wheat. People generally make this as a grain so it puffs up soft when poached – I actually like toasting it for an awesome crunch and nutty flavor with a huge punch of protein-fiber. After a couple minutes I added about 10 to 12 wonton wrappers, cut into wonton strips. Those two were my twists to the crunchy elements. I then added the traditional crunch into the same toasting/sautéing pan: a nice handful each of shelled pepitas (pumpkin seeds), shelled sunflower seeds, hand-sliced almonds, and one packaged of Ramen noodles, broken into small chunks. I let them all toast together until they're all golden brown. I added a little more salt, but I DID NOT add the Ramen flavoring – I discarded that.

Finally I was ready to make the dressing. This was probably the biggest guess of all. I knew it had some soy element. So I decided to add a little Asian flavoring into basic Balsamic vinaigrette. I added a little more than one tablespoon of Balsamic and a little less than three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. Then I added about half a tablespoon of chili oil, a tablespoon of low sodium soy sauce and a tablespoon of low sodium teriyaki sauce. Lastly I added a pinch of pepper and vigorously shook up the dressing. I poured it over the cabbage-lime-tomato-chive-onion mixture and tossed it well. Then I added the slightly-cooled but still-warm pan of toasted “crunch” – the almonds, wontons, bulgur, pepitas, sunflower seeds and Ramen noodles. (I can't tell you how delicious that crunch tastes.) I tossed the crunch into the dressed salad base until it was all combined. The dressing intermingles with the crunch while the heat of the crunch helps to tone down the rawness of the cabbage and onions, without reducing their crispness.

The final salad tasted so close to the original that Julia swore I had received the recipe from her mother. It's one of our favorite dishes to eat – period – so she was pretty excited. If we still lived nearby, we'd probably still be begging the Mama to make it for us all the time. The different kinds of crunch and crisp with a perfect dressing make this truly a unique and addictingly delicious dish. I know I didn't match it perfectly, but I imagine she would appreciate the imitation as flattery and perhaps even try the twists in future versions. But of course I would take her version of the original any day. As long as we get to see her next time we eat it. She was the truly missing element from my salad, no matter how tasty it turned out.

Julia's Dinner Party: Salad Course

Yesterday, I began describing the meal I cooked last weekend to celebrate Julia's graduation with the opening course: cheddar, sage and tomato in puff pastry.

After these mouthwatering opening morsels, I moved the family quickly onto the salad so the main dishes wouldn't get cold. This crisp, sweet and tart interlude was highlighted by apples, parmesan, citrus and maple.

To make the salads, I started by coring and dicing 4 large apples. I chose some red-yellow ones for their constitution and sweetness, but Granny Smith would have been nice too. As I finished each apple I added it to a large metal bowl and squeezed half a lime over the apples to prevent browning, and gave them a stir. By the time I had all four apples done, I had used two limes, which was more than enough to coat all the apples. To the apples I added about half a red onion diced and then 6 ounces of Reggiano parmesan sliced paper thin. I tossed these items lightly and then added about 10 large handfuls of baby spinach on top. I did this so I could save the salad in the fridge before tossing it and not fear the greens becoming wilted.

I then made a very easy maple vinaigrette to go on the salad. I combined red wine vinegar and extra virgin olive oil in a little plastic container in a three-to-two ratio to get about half a cup. I added two tablespoons of real maple syrup, salt and pepper and covered the plastic with its lid and shook it vigorously for over a minute. The final result was nice and thick, with a good amount of tang and sweet intermingling.

When ready to serve I tossed the salad with all of the dressing, and it coated it well. The salad served 9 generous portions and certainly could have been stretched. The taste itself was very nice. The sweet and sour of the ingredients played well with the sweet and sour of the dressing for a nice light treat before dinner. It's not a new idea for a salad, but I think this was one of the better apple salads I've had. And the table seemed to agree – except Erica, who informed me that apples do not belong in salads. Who knew?