White Bean salad, spread, or dip

Sometimes you have to admit that, no matter how hard you try to prove otherwise, you are wrong. Right on the heels of my last post about how great dried beans are, I have to take it back – at least partially. Dried beans can be great. Just not if you’re as absent-minded as me. And not if you need them right now.

I was going to write this whole post about how, now that you’ve got your pantry stocked with dried beans, you should try to enjoy them in something summery instead of the usual types of heavy bean dishes one thinks of. Well, there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of summer bean recipes that use dried beans. They are really winter ingredients, for when you don’t have as much fresh anything around. They take a long time to cook and, if you’re me, they burn if you aren’t paying close enough attention.

But however you get your white beans into a soft enough state for this dish, do it. It is delightful. It’s a great lunch or side, or even dinner for one or two. I make it when I want something quiet. The flavors are nothing to write home about, but this dish can be perfectly satisfying to snack on while doing something else. I also make this when I find it hard to rustle up an appetite for a full meal, or anything too rich. And hey, if you do repeatedly burn them (like me), you get a nice smoky flavor on the non-burnt beans.

This dish is simple, though it requires some advance planning to be able to use dried beans. The beans will need to soak, be cooked, and then the mixture should marinate so that the flavors permeate the beans.  In a pinch, a can of small white beans will also do – just rinse and add the rest of the ingredients (see step 4 and on, below). The dried beans have a much better texture and flavor, but make the dish much more complicated, so it is a trade-off.

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Tangy Bulgur Salad and New Foods

We were recently invited to a potluck lunch with an ingenious theme: “New Foods.” The host wanted guests to bring foods that would most likely be new to him, and hopefully the other guests. I gave the challenge a lot of thought. I eat a lot of weird things, so I had plenty of options. But I wanted the food to be new to me as well, at least in preparation if not in flavor. So my thoughts immediately turned to Syrian food, which contains many familiar elements of other Middle Eastern cooking, but often goes a little more savory and tangy than sweet.

While most people are familiar with some Middle Eastern flavors, I often find that Syrian food, especially the cuisine originating in Aleppo, is really unknown outside of that ethnicity. That probably has to do with the fact that most Jewish Syrians live in the New York area, and there are very few Syrian restaurants. In my family, all the best cooks cook for family functions and their homes are like exclusive restaurants, though none of them cook professionally. I think this has to do with the way that cooking for people you love might be different than cooking for customers. What it amounts to though, is that unless you have a Syrian friend, you probably won’t get to taste a lot of the more unique Syrian dishes.

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Zesty Avocado Quinoa Salad

Now that warmer weather has finally come our way, I find myself craving fresh bright salads for dinner. I don’t know about you, but I can’t often satisfy myself with just greens. I’d have to eat a mountain to be full and it wouldn’t really be a nutritionally complete meal. That’s why I’ve been toying with mixing grains into my salads.

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Deviled Egg Salad

I had a terrible craving for eggs this week. Not just any eggs though. I wanted deviled eggs… and a lot of them. A normal person would take that as a sign and just make them – I mean, why mess with a perfect thing, right? Not me. I’m far too lazy for that.

To make a good deviled egg, you’re supposed to lay the eggs on their sides overnight to get the yolk to sit nicely in the middle. You’re supposed to let them adjust to room temperature before boiling so they don’t crack when the water gets hot. You even have to worry about how old the eggs are, since fresher eggs don’t peel well after being boiled. You have to boil them perfectly and hope none of the them break. You have to rig up some kind of piping device and fill the egg whites up prettily, all the while losing a tiny bit of that deviled yolky goodness to every surface it comes into contact with. And after all of that work, you have to constrain yourself from eating all of them at once, for the sake of your health, and because you know it will be a long time before you muster up the patience for such a project again.

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Egg White Avocado Salad

I love egg salad, but whenever I eat it, I can’t help but feel guilty. My guilt probably stems from the fact that I’d never sit and eat more than two hard boiled eggs, but I would eat several heaping servings of egg salad without a second thought. I have the same difficulty saying no to avocados, but, as I mentioned when I wrote about avocados, I’ve just decided not to care.

One day though, something magical happened. I was at a catered party and they had the most delicious egg salad on little toast rounds: just egg whites and avocados. It had all the simple creaminess of egg salad, but felt much lighter and cooler due to the lack of yolks. And absolutely no guilt, though maybe there should have been, as I easily downed a dozen of them.

I’ve been dreaming about this salad ever since and last night, I set out to make some hard boiled eggs and like a fool, wandered into another room and forgot about them for half an hour. When I got them off the heat, I realized that the yolks would be too chalky and grey to enjoy. Luckily, I also happened to have some perfectly ripe avocados on pause in the fridge. The accident created the perfect scenario to try this recipe, as I don’t usually have egg whites on their own. I’m reserving the less-than-desirable yolks for another project.

Clearly I didn’t invent the recipe below, but it’s definitely something that is getting added to my repertoire whenever I happen to have the ingredients on hand.

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Warm Creamy Peanut Chicken Salad

This isn’t the prettiest chicken salad out there, but really what chicken salad is? This salad is really easy to throw together after a long day and is great warm or cold. You can go as gourmet or as instant as you like by using fresh chicken, fresh grated ginger and garlic, or canned chicken and dried spices, respectively. No matter how you do it (I’ve whipped up dozens of variations myself), this chicken salad packs a satisfyingly flavorful punch.

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Lotus Root Salad

Lotus root is a beautiful vegetable that is surprisingly versatile. I’ve used it in stews, salads, and (my favorite use) tempura. JustHungry.com has a helpful guide for how to prepare this starchy root. Ever since I read this post, I’ve wanted to make Maki’s Lotus root, cucumber and Serrano ham salad. I finally had the lotus root and a baked ham (thanks to Jen’s mom and her generous holiday gift-giving). However, I forgot the cucumber. In realizing that I would probably have to make some substitutions, I decided to add a few things here and there. I’m actually quite pleased with the results. Read on for my take on Maki’s recipe.

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