Edible Tulip

50 Salads for Everyday Eating: #3 Steamed Cauliflower in a Caper Vinaigrette with Parsley and Thyme

Most vegetables have different personalities when they're cooked: braised radishes become sweet, subtle, downright alluring; broccoli eaten raw is often wooden and uninteresting but fried in peanut oil with cashews or tossed with rapini in sesame oil it can be a magnificently earthy conduit of flavour; and cauliflower -- the wall flower at the vegetable dip party, white and bulbous -- turns tricks when roasted or stewed in tandoori spices or pickled. Even if you don't like pickles, you will like pickled cauliflower. Trust me. It's addictive.

This cauliflower salad isn't so much pickled as steamed and then, while hot, doused in a dense vinaigrette with capers for extra acidity and bite.

And, when it's cooked just enough that it loses its cruciferous burn, cauliflower absorbs ingredients swiftly and dutifully. Refrigerated, this salad retains its zing and vibrancy for a few days although I like it best just cooked, still steaming.

Great with grilled white fish or tossed with pasta and toasted breadcrumbs.

Cauliflower Salad with Parsley and Thyme in a Caper Vinaigrette**

1 large cauliflower, broken into florets

2 garlic cloves, mashed/pressed/minced

1/2 cup chopped parsley

1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves (run your hands down the stem, the leaves will shed easily)

1/4 cup grape tomatoes, quartered

3 tablespoons capers, rinsed

3 tablespoons white wine vinegar

6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

red pepper flakes

salt

** Garbanzo beans are a personal choice but great if you're looking to make this a salad lunch.

1. Place a steamer in the bottom of a large pot over one inch of water. Place the cauliflower in the basket and bring to a boil. Steam for one minute, lift the lid for a few seconds, then cover again and steam for 6-8 minutes, until tender. Drain and rinse under cold water for 2 minutes and set aside in a colander to continue draining. 

2. In a large bowl, mix together the garlic, parsley, thyme, tomatoes, capers, vinegar and olive oil. Season with the red pepper flakes, salt and pepper. Add the cauliflower and toss together. Marinate at room temperature for an hour. Serve warm as a side to grilled fish. Serve cold as a salad on a bed of mixed lettuces.

Makes 6 side portions or 3 single portions.

p.s. Grow herbs. As much and as many as possible. Then experiment. You can't reproduce the vitality that fresh mint or basil or lemon thyme bring to a dish, especially the simplest of dishes like sliced tomatoes or tossed greens or grated carrots, and in the fall when the first frosts hit your sage will still rally and you can casually toss some into your mushroom risotto. Herbs, in a pinch, especially for simplistic palettes, can add just enough punch to make a dish interesting.

50 Salads for Everyday Eating: #2 Lentil Salad with Grated Sweet Potato and Black Olives in a Curried Dressing

This is a salad for a winter day: a dull, drab January day in need of resuscitation. It has spark and colour and enough weirdness to arouse the curiosity of a co-worker: radishes and black olives?

Once, I had a friend - we've lost touch, haven't spoken in years - who married young and lived with her husband in an apartment above one of the most popular Chinese restaurants in Toronto, on Spadina Ave. There was a large deck, perfect for midnight summer soirees, and a hammock that hung between the bedrooom and the living room. At 3 a.m., when I was stumbling out onto the spit-strewn smelly sidewalk, there was always a line up out front of the restaurant. The place would be packed. Back at the party, they were still calling down for the special order of "green tea" which meant budweiser in cans in a paper bag at a premium. But apart from all that, what I remember about her, and we always remember something about the people we meet, was that she liked to go to St. Lawrence Market on a Saturday morning and she liked to buy fresh sesame covered Montreal bagels, chewy and sweet, and then she liked to eat the warm bread with salty black olives and crunchy hot red radishes. I was pretty sure she was onto something.

I love lentils. They're like perfect little morsels of earthiness. This salad uses the smallish brown Eston lentils (although these days I'm cooking the tiny black beluga ones and then combining them with a slightly larger chewier brown lentil. I like the contrast). Any lentil would work, but avoid the big, fat green ones. They're better served in a soup. Lentils shouldn't be mushy. They should act like a sprinkling of nuts, something dense, dark and wonderful.

Legumes typically go well with a lot of different flavours. Last winter, I couldn't get enough of a salad that I took to work all winter long: lentils in a mustard vinaigrette tossed with a generous amount of escarole lettuce - the sweet, bitter, crunchy sort - and just before eating I'd heat it in the microwave for a minute until the lettuce just barely began to wilt and then I'd toss it all together: the steaming lentils, the pungeant vinaigrette, the almost cooked greens, and it was, I'm not kidding, one of the most incredible things I have ever eaten. It was France. It was moss. It was eating the most delectable thing you dug up from the ground. 

50 Salads for Everyday Eating: #1 Roasted Brussels Sprouts and Toasted Pecans with Greens in a Warm Whiskey Mustard Dressing

January. If there's a time to commit to eating more greens and reds and purples and experimenting with new vegetables (kohlrabi, daikon radish, napa cabbage, pea sprouts, Jerusalem artichoke...) and perhaps giving old hangups a new chance (brussels sprouts, beets, cabbage, zucchini...) then now is it. I have some tips to help you along.

• Wash your vegetables as soon as you get home from the grocery store. Toss them into the sink, fill it up with water, and soap, let sit, drain, then spin dry everything and put into large ziplock bags. The stuff will keep perfectly for a week and be ready to use when you want it.
• Another idea, when you buy things like oversized good looking carrots and rustic beets, and have good intentions, but then they get lost with the busyness of life, and the stuff turns limpid in the crisper drawer, here's a solution: just set aside half an hour one weekend afternoon and get out your food processor with the grating blade. Peel the carrots and beets and then process away. Squeeze out the excess water from the grated vegetables and then store them in a tupperware to add to salad with nuts and dried fruit and salty cheeses all week long! Perfect!

Meanwhile, here's a salad for you, delicious for fall and winter when brussels sprouts and nuts are a welcome hearty addition to salad.

This salad makes enough for about 6.

Melt some butter or olive oil in a shallow baking pan in an oven preheated to  400 degrees. Toss about 1 lb of sprouts and 1/2 cup pecans or walnuts in the butter with some salt. Roast until the sprouts are golden and the nuts fragrant, about 12 to 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, organize your lettuces. Winter ones are especially wonderful with the warm sprouts and nuts and the heated dressing. Think frissee and endive, escarole and radicchio. Add freshly chopped herbs like chunks of Italian parsley or leaves of oregano. Salty shavings of pecorino or Parmesan would be good too.

Make a salad dressing that is robust: 1 tablespoon whiskey seed mustard (regular dijon will do just fine, minus the kick of the whiskey!), 3 tablespoons white wine/tarragon vinegar, 2 tablespoons water, 6 tablespoons olive oil, 1/4 cup minced shallot (or green onion), 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon black pepper. Prepare in a glass jar or ceramic bowl so you can microwave it for 2 minutes before pouring over the salad. I like to serve the dressing hot because it slightly wilts the winter lettuces and it's a magnificent flavour burst: bitter endive with sweet warm whiskey and the heat of a fine mustard. But if you're going with traditional lettuces then avoid a warm dressing -- it'll make short shrift of the lettuces and you'll be left with a soggy mess -- and choose a simple oil and white wine or sherry or balsamic vinegar.

Prepare a generous amount of greens in a large wooden serving bowl. Add the roasted but slightly cooled nuts and brussels sprouts. Heat the dressing and add enough to just coat everything. Keep tossing until absorbed.

Dried cranberries are great here too. As are roasted heirloom colourful beets.

Go for it. Think large. Think wonderful.