Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Salad Days and Bonzo Nights: Revenge of the Recipe Corner

Here’s a tasty recipe that happened to burble to the surface of this very blog, when I started paging through my notebook looking for stuff I haven’t posted yet.  This one was buried way, way down at the very front of the book, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less blogworthy.  Well, maybe it means it’s a little less blogworthy, but it’s still an excellent salad, so shut up and start heating up a cast iron salad bowl and sterilizing your lettuce-deboners.  There’s salading afoot!

The thing about salad is, it sounds easy.  “Oh, I’ll just make salad.” All you think you really need to do is deep-fry a quarter of a head of iceberg lettuce, float it in ketchup, and drape some bacon on top.  That’s a great salad, you think, till you sit down to eat it and as soon as you try to bury your fork in its glistening flank it does a half-gainer off your plate and into a wall where the ketchup makes it stick and it just slowly slides down to the floor leaving a stain like from the kitchen in the Shining or something.  And that’s when you realize it’s harder to make salad than they told you in boot camp or wherever the hell it was you were being misinformed about salad making and how easy it is.  Or isn’t.  And then you cry.  Pathetic, really.

But then again, if you have a particular salad in mind, it can be pretty easy to make salad.  Of course, you still have to chop and slice and grind, painstakingly turning vulgar vegetables and crude itays into a glorious julienned synthesis, but that’s your damn problem, you’re the one who promised to bring salad.  Next time, promise to bring lunchmeat, and you can just buy packages of it at the supermarket and cut it open with some scissors and be done with your whole wonderful contribution to the meal.  But this time you promised salad, and damned if you aren’t going to make it a good one.  So here, make this one, and enjoy.  I dare you.

PYWRONG SALAD with Goat Cheese

Julienne some pears - l like bosc, but you know, I’m sort of bosky.  Toss them with baby spinach and golden raisins (not “fool’s raisins,” aka raisin pyrite).  Top the salad with sliced toasted almonds, goat cheese, and a panful of fried proscuitto and caramelized onions.  Eh?  Proscuitto is what Carmella is always offering Tony Soprano when he wanders into his mobster kitchen - it’s paper-thin slices of cured pigmeat.  Cut it into strips (make sure the knife is sharp, this stuff is tough) and fry it over medium heat in a little skillet with just a little olive oil till it’s starting to get brown; then turn the heat to low and dump in some thinly sliced onion.  Stir it all around till the pigfat is all over the onions, and then let them slowly cook down to a nice mellow brown color. 

Notes: For julienning and onion slicing, get a mandomoline slicer already.  I tell you every time and you STILL. DON’T.  LISTEN.  Jeez.  Okay, the sliced toasted almonds come that way in a bag - do not try slicing your own almonds, or putting them in your toaster.  Baby spinach is better because the stems are smaller and it can’t fight back as hard (hence the popular saying, “like taking spinach from a baby).  Also, you will want to put dressing on the salad before you top it with the various goodies - I suggest olive oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce, tobasco, sugar, and celery seed (premixed in a flagon, or, alternately, a ramekin). 

This is a delicious salad and anyone who eats pigmeat, curdled goat milk, and jailbait Popeye-crank will love it, and that’s mostly who-all eats salad anyway so you should be as golden as your moist plump raisins.  But just in case, for one more shot at cooking veggies, here’s what I found scrawled under the salad recipe on that long-lost page of my nearly-finished notebook:

CRIPSY FIRED GARBONGOZ

Get a can of garbonzo beans ("chickpea" is a demeaning, but entertaining, synonym), open it, and rinse those suckers off.  Then put them in a bowl lined with some paper towels and pat them dry.  In another bowl, mix some cayenne pepper and garlic powder, and then pour in the dried-off bonzos. Mix it around till the bonzos are covered with spices.  Then heat enough olive oil to come halfway up the bonzos in a skillet till it’s pretty damn hot, and pour in the spiced beans.  Let them fry for a few minutes, till they’re browning on the bottom, and then flip them over with a chefly wristflip, sending NO superhot oil up your arms and spilling NO half-cooked bonzos all over the kitchen floor and into hard-to-clean areas under your shelving unit.  When the bonzos are uniformly browned, remove them from the pan and drain them off on paper towels laid over newspaper or a paper shopping bag.  These are delicious eaten directly with your knife, or mixed with green beans that have been panfried with just a little oil and then steamed in a tablespoon or two of rice vinegar. 

And let it be recognized, that this is a healthy and delicious blog post, full of the fruits of nature’s bounty and the bounty of nature’s fruits.  Plus, I mentioned both “boner” and “unit.” That’s some quality blogging, there.  Drape your bacon over that.