Month: June 2009

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Dense salads continued . . .

 A pithy review of the last post

Dense salads . . .

  1. consist of small pieces of real food plus a dressing (also real food).
  2. are easy. It’s hard to “make a mistake” while preparing them.
  3. are good “fast food” because they keep in the fridge a few days and we can nosh on them any time. They help keep us out of the cheesecake and chocolate (mostly).
  4. are good for you. You make them out of REAL FOOD.
  5. are infinitely (or close to it) variable so you don’t have to get bored eating them.
  6. can be very economical.
  7. Commercially prepared dense salads (like those in plastic containers or the big grocery chain deli) may have chemicals in them. Yuck! Chemicals taste bad and they are not a food group.
  8. You learned how to make Basic Chicken Salad. If there’s anything you didn’t understand, or any steps you don’t know how to do, write me a comment and I’ll clarify it for you.

I know I didn’t say all those things in exactly those words, but those were the explicit and implicit lessons.

Basic Chicken Salad dressed up to impress the neighbors 

Michelle commented yesterday “Sounds like my “Instant Karma” chicken salad. I add some curry and raisins instead of apples. It’s addicting and good for your soul!” I love that name. She anticipated today’s post . . .

Curried Chicken Salad

“Curry” refers to a savory sauce seasoned with the  yellow powder we associate with sitar music and aging hippies. We aren’t going to make a sauce but we are going to use the powder.

It’s not a spice but a mixture of ground herbs and spices. There are probably as many combinations as there are Indian grandmothers but they all contain turmeric which gives them that yellow color. Other ingredients may include a bunch of C-words—cardamon, coriander, cumin, cayenne, cinnamon, dried chilis—and maybe some ginger and fennel and mustard seeds. You can grind your own but I get it in small amounts from The Food Co-op bulk spices and herbs area though you can buy it at any grocery store. It can be mild or pack a lot of heat. I suggest you buy mild and add cayenne if you want it hotter.

To make “Curried Chicken Salad” follow the basic salad procedure except add some raisins like Michelle, or I like Craisins (sweetened dried cranberries) because I love the dark red with the bright yellow dressing. I usually add coarsely chopped almonds or pecans, and I leave in the apple (if I have one on hand).

Add some of the curry powder (a spoonful or two) to your mayo, blend it well, scrape it into the bowl with the small food chunks and toss the whole thing. By that I mean toss the ingredients in the bowl until everything is covered more or less evenly. Use a couple of forks or a spoon and fork. You want it sort of “fluffed up.” (I know, how can a dense salad be fluffy? The ingredients are dense, the salad is lightly combined. Don’t push all the air out of to stuff it into a container, for example.)

If you present this in a pretty bowl lined with lettuce leaves your neighbors at the annual close-off-the-street-potluck will be so impressed that they’ll smile and wave every time they see you for the rest of the year.

On second thought, it may not fly in some neighborhoods, but it’s very pretty nonetheless and when it comes to food . . .  beauty counts.

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Opportunistic eating #1: dense salads-chicken

Opportunistic Eating (Noshing)

Unless I’m with friends or family I seldom eat “a meal.” Instead, I nosh. That’s a Yiddish word for grazing or grabbing a snack like a bowl of soup or a chunk of chocolate (organic dark).

When I feel a hunger tug I do not want to wash lettuce, spin it dry, tear it up, chop accompanying veggies, make the vinaigrette, etc. I just want to eat and I’ll go for the chocolate every time unless I have cheesecake in the house. In other words, when it comes to food I’m like a Beluga whale, an opportunistic feeder. I eat almost any real food and will choose the most available thing that I can find at the moment.

And because I want to stay healthy and keep my weight reasonable, I’ve devised strategies to keep me out of the cheesecake (which is about the easiest thing in the world to nosh. You just go after it with a fork.) In cold weather I make big pots of soupstews (thick, savory, creative pots o’ goodness.) In warm weather I make big bowls of “dense salads.” I keep them in the fridge, front and center.

Introducing “The Dense Salad”

A dense salad is a mixture of  veggies, meat, fish, grains, fruit, pasta, cheese, legumes, hard-boiled eggs, all cut into small pieces and tied together with a “dressing.” You don’t put all those things into one salad. You just pick a few things that go well together and dress them properly.

Go to the deli department of the supermarket and you’ll see many combos. They’re pricey and the dressings are “prepared,” meaning I can taste chemicals and weird non-real-food aftertastes. So today we have our first lesson on dense salads . . . .

Your Basic Chicken Salad

Chicken breasts are widely available. They’re not very flavorful which makes them a perfect choice for salad. The boneless, skinless kind are the most expensive, but probably the easiest to try if you feel unsure about setting out on this adventure. If you’re willing to pick over the meat to remove the bones and skin, you can save money.

Get out a wide, flat saucepan or fry pan with a cover. Rinse the chicken breasts and put them in it with about 1/4 inch of water. Cover, turn the heat on and bring to a boil. When it gets there (it depends on your heat source for the time so you need to pay attention. When you have constant big bubbles and lots of steam, that’s a boil) turn the heat way down. After a couple of minutes it will settle into a gentler bubbling called a simmer. Simmer for about 15 minutes.

You can insert meat thermometers (160 degrees) and all that to see if your food is safe to eat but just use common sense. Does it look like “cooked chicken” all the way through? If you can see any transparency or red or blood when you cut into it, simmer some more. Don’t simmer it for hours or it will be as tough as an old fighting cock, though even that doesn’t matter much when you’re making a salad.

What to do once the chicken is cooked

Cool it. The chicken, I mean. Remove it from the pan and put it into a bowl. Put the bowl in the fridge after you cover it with plastic wrap or a big plate.

While it’s cooling let’s see what you have in the larder that goes with it. Celery and onion are the most important. They both keep a long time so I always have them on hand. The only caveat is that the onion needs to be sweet or light. That would be “green onions” or scallions which are short lived, red onions which last longer but have more bite, or one of the “sweets,” Vidalia, Walla Walla, Burmuda or some others I don’t know.

Wash and chop up some celery and put it in a big bowl. Glass or ceramic is best. Chop up some onion and add it to the celery.

I know I haven’t given you amounts, like a cup of this and a pound of that. I learned to cook from my Grandma and Mom and other old ladies who seldom used recipes. And that’s a key to learning to feed yourself well. Pay attention to what’s in front of you not what’s on paper. So you got too much onion or it’s chopped too big . . . so what? This is not open-heart surgery. No one will die from it and next time you’ll adjust it a little to suit you better.

How to peel an onion or chop celery? Google them. There are tons of resources that already teach that. My goal is not to duplicate that information but to adjust your attitude toward “cooking” and eating.

[onion addendum added in 2022: I forgot to tell you this earlier even though it’s a technique I’ve used for years.. Chop or slice your bulb onion of any sort (i.e. not scallions) and put the pieces onto a bowl. Cover in cold water and let them float around for about 15 minutes. Drain the onions well and then add to the salad. This takes some of the bite out. As I’ve gotten older I like raw onion to be a little more gentle.]

Off the soapbox and back to the bowl

Time to take out the chicken and chop it up and put it into the bowl with the celery and onions.

Other things you might add

. . . a chopped up apple, especially a green one, chopped dill or sweet pickle or cucumber.

Time for the dressing

Lot’s of choices here. The quick and dirty (and delicious) first choice is to dollop in some GOOD, REAL mayonnaise. How much? Well, you don’t want it swimming in it and you don’t want it dry. Again, use your judgment. You can’t start to trust it until you exercise it. Add some salt and pepper (that will be a whole blog entry by itself but I’m in a hurry tonight). Toss it all together and serve on a lettuce leaf or eat it out of the bowl with a fork.

I’m starting a theme here and it is always and foremost EAT REAL FOOD.

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Too Many Choices

In 1977 my favorite grocery store in the Detroit suburb where I lived was remodeled. It morphed from a regular, human-sized environment into an airplane hangar. It was big enough for weather patterns to form inside.

The first time I went in I skirted the outside edge. I felt safe among the mountains of vegetables and fruits, meats and poultry, eggs and dairy  because I could visually ID them. But my downfall came as I detoured into the interior to get a box of cereal. I went tharn. That’s what happened to the bunnies in Watership Down when they were overwhelmed. It’s the lapine equivalent to a deer being caught in the headlights.

I mean, really . . . have you looked at the number of different kinds of cereal there are? I can’t speak for the 21st century, of course, because I rarely venture into the interior aisles of a grocery store and never to the cereal aisle, but there were too many then and I’m guessing that there are more now. 

I never went back to that store. I found a bakery, green grocer, wine store and a butcher, and they filled all my needs. It sounds like it would take a lot longer to shop at four stores instead of one but it didn’t. In fact it was faster because I didn’t have to ponder the choices . . . the thousands of choices. 

I turns out, I’m not the only one who thinks that too much choice is too much despite our cultural belief to the contrary. There’s a guy who wrote a book about it. He gives a compelling TED presentation here:  Barry Schwartz talks about The Paradox of Choice.