1. Raw kale Caesar salad (recipe and post forthcoming):
2. Salad made with fresh butter lettuce from TL's garden:
I really wanted to make this salad with pear, but I didn't have any handy, so I made it with apples instead, which were a respectable substitute. I made it a few days later with pear and the combination was bliss. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture (or I did, but forgot to put the memory card in the camera, and uploading these photos entails more work than I care for right now), but the perfect butter lettuce salad consists of:
-butter lettuce (preferably from TL's garden, but if you are not TL or someone who lives upstairs from TL, then regular butter lettuce will do. Baby butter lettuce tastes better.) washed and roughly torn
-shaved bits of Parmesan cheese
-a ripe pear (a quarter or however much you want, thinly sliced into wedges)
-freshly and coarsely ground black pepper that you grind yourself
-a drizzle of very good olive oil
The sharpness of the Parmesan and the bite of the ground pepper complement the butteriness of the pear and lettuce really well.
You can add more things if you want, but you really don't need anything else.
I'm in trouble. It's not as if cashews aren't already addicting enough. I try not to keep them around the house, because I can eat gobfuls in one sitting if I'm not carefully monitoring my cashew intake. There are plenty of other nuts and seeds with far more nutritive value that I can consume. (Though cashews do provide you with lots of copper.) So I keep my cashews far out of reach in my cupboard. Still, it's hard to resist the occasional cashew or two. Or three. Or twenty.
And this is with plain old boring raw cashews.
So take a plain old boring cashew and add just two flavor elements:
1. roasting it to bring out its nuttiness
2. sauteing it with a little bit of melted butter and curry leaves
Now you have cashew-turned-crack. It's really that addicting, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on whether you think this is a good thing. I made a cup of this a few weeks ago, and I ate all of it in one weekend. I mean, these are things you're only supposed to eat maybe dozens at a time or so. (I give myself a little bit more leeway with serving sizes since I mostly don't eat meat, so this is one way to up my protein intake.) And oh dear. . .the recipe says it makes enough for six.
The curry leaves give it a wonderful indescribable smoky aroma. Of course, roasting anything brings out its flavor. (Though I don't like buying already-roasted cashews, b/c for some reason, the store-roasted ones sometimes taste rancid. I'm strange like that.)
I found the recipe in the SF Chronicle. I hope this link still works. It's really a heavenly combo. If I were a beer-drinking type, I think it would go splendidly with beer.
I made paella with the pan that Celadon gave me. She also gave me a book with a zillion recipes, so I had trouble deciding from all the yummy-sounding recipes, but I finally decided on a shrimp paella. I had a little trouble keeping the pan from browning, but I think it's because it's my first time using it. It is supposed to get better with use and repeated seasoning.
Since there were about 4 shrimp paella recipes, I borrowed a little bit from all 4 recipes. I also added sun-dried tomatoes, since I was out of broth and sun-dried tomatoes make everything taste better. Mmmm.
Well, when all was said and done, I had about 6 servings of paella. I still need to work on my paella-making technique, b/c while it was pretty good for a first try, the shrimp came out kindof dry, despite my adding it at the last minute possible, and some of the rice came out al dente, which is fine if it were pasta, but I don't think rice is one of these things that is supposed to be al dente. I also think it would've been much improved by using a really good fish broth, which I didn't have.
A good homemade fish broth requires me to deal with fish carcasses, and I'm not sure if I want to deal with a decapitated fish head. Thus, I used veggie broth+sun-dried tomatoes instead, which didn't quite do the trick.
I think that next time, I'm going to make this at someone's house so I can share the fruits of my labor!
2. Salad made with fresh butter lettuce from TL's garden:
I really wanted to make this salad with pear, but I didn't have any handy, so I made it with apples instead, which were a respectable substitute. I made it a few days later with pear and the combination was bliss. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture (or I did, but forgot to put the memory card in the camera, and uploading these photos entails more work than I care for right now), but the perfect butter lettuce salad consists of:
