All cooks have a few basic recipes that they turn to again and again over the course of a year. Potato and green bean salad is one of mine. I make it different ways depending on the season and my mood. It's very good dressed with just olive oil and lemon juice, but it becomes absolutely superb when bound with homemade Green Goddess. If you're familiar only with the bottled version of this dressing, you must try my recipe, which is based on the original, invented in the 1920s by the great San Francisco chef Victor Hirtzler.
This salad epitomizes the Vietnamese love of contrasting flavors and textures.
The mild cream-Dijon dressing keeps this salad wine friendly.
Tender greens with somewhat assertive flavors, such as peppery arugula and watercress or bitter endive, or young dandelion go wonderfully with sweet citrus fruits like oranges, mandarins, and blood oranges, ripe pears or crunchy apples, and figs. Roasted nuts bring out the sweetness in the greens. There are endless possible variations on this theme. One of my favorites is arugula, blood oranges, and roasted pine nuts. Or, for an easy main-course luncheon salad, combine frisée, quartered ripe figs, and walnuts, then top it with thin sheets of prosciutto or smoked goose breast.
This salad is a combination of simple elements: mesclun salad, warm goat cheese, roasted garlic and good, crusty bread: a perfect lunch. The garlic cloves, soft and puree-like from roasting, can be squeezed onto slabs of bread, along with the creamy goat cheese, to make an impromptu open-face sandwich as you eat the greens.
This chicken salad recipe should never be forgotten. With its chunks of pineapple and crunchy pieces of water chestnut, and the surprise flavoring of curry, it is delicious from the first bite and people will ooh and aah. The salad can be served on top of butterhead lettuce leaves or sandwiched between two pieces of whole wheat bread.
Ingredients
This refreshing salad goes perfectly with the ham. To make short work of trimming the green beans, use kitchen scissors.
On paper, yams (a.k.a. sweet potatoes) should make a great-tasting salad with a gorgeous golden color. However, my first attempts turned out mushy and cloyingly sweet. The answer to the problem turned out to be to use a combination of roasted yams with boiled potatoes (peeled after boiling, for the same reason), and a brightly acidic lemon vinaigrette to balance the sugary yams. Mint supplies a fresh note, but cilantro or parsley can be substituted. Use medium potatoes so they cook evenly and with relative speed.
Betty Crocker was never a real person. "Born" in 1921, Betty Crocker was at first only a signature and a voice on a radio program created to answer consumer questions about Gold Medal flour. She didn't have a face until a portrait was commissioned in the mid-1930s. Betty Crocker represented one twenties ideal, the perfect happy homemaker, while the flapper represented the decade's "other woman."