Return of the Living Recipe Corner: KASHABERRY SALAD in about 17 steps of varying easiness
Is… is that you, weary internet traveler? Returning to view the ruins and remnants of what was once a mighty, puissant blog? (And for the record, “puissant” is a good thing.) I can see you, cowering in the shadowed threshold, peering into the crepitating darkness which once was, still somehow is, and may yet become again - the Chucklehut. Welcome, and take off your damn shoes before you trample HTML all over my nice throwrugs! Yeah, it’s been a busy time for Chuck and the El-Hutts. I’ve been doing a lot of writing for work, wound up enmired in yet another final round of edits on my massive story about high-stakes dreydel gambling (no really), got sent out on a road trip (non-Animal House version), and a combination of other factors has led me to forsake the key 1-to-3 am blogging window that was once so productive for me. But on the plus side, I threw my back out. Well, composted it, really. The point is, yowch.
But that’s not why you came here, is it? You came here to gloat and glory in my ignominious downfall. I used to post daily, even more than daily, back when words were cheap and blogging was exotic. Now there are pet lizards that friendfeed more often than I manage to get a handful of random adverbs up here. I’d say it was sad, but it makes me sad to say it.
So what I’ll say instead, is SALAD! Yes, it’s “sad,” but with an extra AL that makes all the difference. In Arabic, it means “THE!” So you can see why I’d want to make sure it’s included. After all, you didn’t just kick your way into some random sub-basement of the Chucklehut. By glorious happenstance, you wound up in the still-warm remnants of what our forebears once knew as RECIPE CORNER - where gustatory history still wells up from the dispoz-all and sprays deliciousness all over your hungry face. It’s time, intrepid blogwalker, and the lot falls to you. Ready your “print screen” button because I’m going to tell you the legend of a salad that will change your life and that of every cranberry in your pantry!
So here’s the thing: I was going to go to a party and wanted to bring a salad, but for gods sake isn’t there enough salad in this soggy old world of ours? Which is to say, what can a fellow do to make a salad that doesn’t get lost in the sea of icebug (sic) lettuce and hand-cut croutons in which we all marinate? I wanted to make a salad that stood up to the competition. Figuratively. A salad that actually stands up would be either creepy or infested. Neither one was my goal. I just wanted classy sophisticated wankers to say that it was the finest damn salad they ever rammed down their arugula holes. It was a challenge, and nothing inspires me more than a challenge. Except maybe a nap, so I took one of those to start, and then turned my attention to the question at hand.
The first thing to come up with was the base. Salads have bases, you know? Because otherwise they’d be acids, chemically speaking. As I typically do. Some salads are based on greens; some on beens; some are pasta-ish and some are mostly made of woodchips and cardboard flakes. And that’s where I wanted to start. Because I hate salad and hoped this one would end its semi-permanent hegemony of the first course. But I failed. I failed utterly.
That is because I didn’t actually use those wood-chips, I just used something that looks like them: KASHA. Kasha is a gluten-free grain, that my peoples typically serve with pasta, because god knows carbs go better with extra carbs. But I was going to use them straight. It was going to be a kasha salad, without pasta, which I was pretty sure no one else would be bringing to this particular party. Or I’d have to kill somebody. This salad stuff is serious, man.
So now I had my kasha, and all I had to do was turn it into a salad. Easy. -ish. Here’s how:
Cook the kasha - two cups of grain in four cups of water with some salt and butter, brought to a boil and then simmered, covered, for, oh, twelve minutes or so. Don’t overcook it. Then again, don’t undercook it. I’d recommend a basic cooking of the kasha. That’s the ticket. Dump it into a large bowl and let the billows of steam rising out of it sear the flesh from your hands as you turn it with a spoon and fan it a little to help the moisture escape. No, seriously, help it off-steam a while, and then season it a bit with a little rice vinegar. Mmm, steaming hot vinegar kasha. No, no, it gets better. I’m pretty sure.
Start gussying it up, with either fresh or frozen gussy. Lacking that, as I was, I used the following ingredients:
1 large yellow onion, diced small and panfried at medium heat till somewhat caramelized but not mushy
1 medium red pepper, diced small and sauteed till just softened
2 good-sized carrots, diced small (you see the pattern here?) and fried in a combination of agave syrup, cinnamon, and powdered ginger root (and as you can see, this is where the poseurs fade away, since it’s tricky to dice a carrot small and you need to get that damned agave syrup too, though it’s pretty handy to have around if you don’t happen to have a taste for unmoistened agave)
1 large ear’s worth of corn, cut free and barely sauteed with salt and white pepper in olive oil
1 bunch of regular (not “special") parsley, leaves only (not the stems), chopped up but not quite minced
-- so so far it’s pretty standard stuff, right? I mean, it’s a lot of chopping and dicing and knife work and such, but those all mean basically the same thing so stop your harping and get back to work already. But here’s where we take a sudden sharp turn toward Scrumptiousville:
Getcherself some simple syrup (ie boil a cup of sugar in a cup of water till it’s totally clear) and use that to simmer a cup of dried cranberries and a cup of dried currants. You can even add a little orange blossom essence if you want to be cool and impress the ... um ... easily-impressed. You don’t need to use all the syrup for this task, just enough to cover the fruit - use the rest for lemonade, cocktails, or art projects. You also only need to simmer the fruit till it’s somewhat rehydrated, or, in other words, a little less chewy. Actually, when it’s done, drain out the simmer-syrup through a sieve and you can make a damn tasty spritzer with it, together with some seltzer and maybe a shot of gin, but that’s up to you. Anyway, when the fruit is drained, chop it up so the cranberries are not much bigger than any of the other ingredients, and mix them all into the kasha. Oh, right, the kasha. I’m still on that kick. You’d thought I’d gotten over it. But really, I’ve barely begun.
Well, that’s not quite true either. I’ve mostly finished, is what I meant to say. All you need to do now is come up with a little dressing, which seemed to work out pretty well when I mixed lime juice, rice vinegar, sesame oil, agave syrup (in this case, agave at the office), and enough water to make it not too oppressively tart or sweet. Toss the dressing into the salad till you can just taste it - you don’t need a whole bunch - and then let it sit in the fridge overnight or whatever. Then when you serve it, stand back and let nature take its course. After the dinosaur die-off and the triumph of bipedal primates, you’ll see that all the best people want to know all about your wonderful salad, and the tired old bowl of baby lettuce, raw bacon and miracle whip just sits there wilting under the bug lamp. You’ll be the life of the party. Unless the lettuce-salad dude offs you. I tell you, man, this is serious stuff.
I call this salad Kashaberry Delight. You can call it what you like. It never answers to anything anyway. But it’s a damn good salad and you can take that to the bank. It’ll give you something to snack on while you’re in line.
Up next, when I get around to it: oh, probably something about a building in my neighborhood, or about a creepy old hag. I’m open to suggestion, and the comments functionality is up and running. As am I, so I’ll smell you later, dude.