Greek Salad

One of the few salads that did have some lettuce - but not much!

The final recipe from my class on Greek food...this one is very easy, full of delicious and healthy things, and very Greek. Rather than consult my extensive cookbook collection on Greek Salad, I talked to my friend Lynn who spent her spring vacation hiking around Greece and exploring ancient ruins. Of course, she had to eat too! She told me that she ate many Greek Salads during her stay and didn't see any lettuce in most of them. OK, skip the lettuce! This makes sense because lettuce is not in season when tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers are in season. The dressing is also simple: a lemon vinaigrette made with olive oil. Because what else would you use in Greece, birthplace of olive culture? As far back as 3,000 years ago, olives were a commercial product in Greece, specifically Crete.

Greek Salad
(serves 4)

1 cucumber, peeled and cut into thick slices
1 large red pepper, cored, seeded and cut into 1" chunks
1 large green pepper, cored, seeded and cut into 1" chunks
2 ripe tomatoes, cored and cut into chunks
½ medium red onion, sliced thinly
4 oz. feta cheese, preferably sheep milk
tasty black olives such as Kalamata
salt
dried oregano crushed between your fingers

Dressing
1 - 2 cloves garlic, smashed
a healthy pinch of salt
1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice
3 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, the best you can afford

Toss together the cucumber, peppers, tomatoes, and red onion in a large bowl. Mash the garlic cloves with the salt until you have a paste of garlic. Press your knife blade while pulling it across the garlic-salt to make the paste. At first, it will be chunky but the abrasive nature of the salt will help to break down the garlic. Place the garlic paste in a medium bowl. Add in the lemon juice and olive oil. Whisk to combine. Drizzle over the vegetables and toss again. Taste for salt, adding more if needed. The feta and olives are quite salty, so don't over-season the veggies.

To serve, arrange ¼ of the vegetables on a plate. Garnish with slices or chunks of feta cheese and olives. Sprinkle lightly with a pinch of dried oregano.

Cauliflower with Orange Flavor

This recipe is inspired by a Spanish salad recipe. It can still be served as a salad if you chill it after cooking. But, the important difference is all the ingredients are cooked. In the original recipe, the cauliflower is blanched but the rest of the ingredients are added raw. Some folks like raw onions, many don't. So, here's a variation on the raw salad that is made even better by sautéing the onions. The original version also has segments of orange; this version gets the punch of orange flavor from orange zest.

Extra-virgin olive oil is fairly expensive. To keep the cost low, we use cheaper vegetable oil for the sautéing and finish it with a drizzle of the more flavorful but more expensive extra-virgin olive oil. You can leave off the drizzle; it's still very tasty.

The average non-sale cost of cauliflower is $1.49 but this time of year, you can find it on sale a lot. Look for those produce sales! Eating what is on sale this week can really save you a bunch of money and stretch your budget for delicious and nutritious fruits and vegetables.

Cauliflower with Orange Flavor
(serves 4-6, costs $2.80)

1 small head of cauliflower (about 1 pound), cut into florets
2 Tablespoons vegetable oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
½ of a red onion, minced
1 small can (3.8 oz.) sliced olives or ⅓ cup chopped kalamata olives
2 Tablespoons water
zest of 1 orange
1 Tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper

Heat the 2 Tablespoons vegetable oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add onion and garlic. Sauté for a minute or two until the onion becomes translucent. Add cauliflower,  olives, and 2 Tablespoons water. Cook, covered, until cauliflower is tender, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat, add orange zest, extra-virgin olive oil, salt, and pepper. Stir to combine. Serve hot, warm, or chilled. If you serve it chilled, you may need to add a bit more salt.

This is a vegetable dish that improves with reheating.

How to Roast a Pepper

Peppers - red, green, yellow, poblano - have a lot of natural sweetness. To play up this sweetness, roast them, either in your oven or on your grill. The texture is also dramatically different - soft and silky rather than crunchy. It's an easy process and can save you a bunch of pennies. Roasted peppers are sold in jars but they are often quite expensive. They are packed in an acidic solution to preserve them. The preservative is usually citric acid, a totally natural preservative but it does change the flavor. Homemade roasted peppers are much sweeter because of this, and you can preserve them by freezing them with no loss of flavor or texture.The next time peppers are on sale, buy a few extra to stash away.

When selecting peppers to roast, look for boxy ones, without lots of wavy parts. The boxy ones will blacken up more evenly then the oddly shaped ones.

Whether you use a grill or the broiler in your oven, the process is the same:

Remove those stupid stickers and wash the peppers.

If broiling in the oven, place on a cookie sheet without a nonstick coating. The coating can't stand the extremely high temperature of the broiler. You may want to line it with aluminum foil to make cleanup easier.

Put the peppers in the oven or on the grill and leave until the skin on the broiling/grilling side is blistered and black. [Usually, you'll be able to peel the skin off easily if the skin has blistered enough to wrinkle up, even if it hasn't turned black.] Turn the peppers to get them blistered or blackened on all sides. When they are done, put in a heatproof bowl and cover the bowl with plastic.

Let them sit for about 10 minutes. The steam will loosen the skins and make them easier to peel.

Peel off the skin and remove the core and seeds. You can rinse them off  to get the last bits off but I was once berated by a famous Southwestern chef for doing this. He said it washed off the sugars. On the other hand, Rick Bayless(*) does rinse them off, so you'll be in pretty good company if you do.

Once the peppers are all clean, use them within a few days or freeze them. I recommend you freeze them as halves or whole. They are much easier to separate if you freeze them in a stack, since you probably won't be using your whole stash of peppers all at once.

Here's recipe that not only makes use of the roasted red peppers, but the beautiful summer tomatoes are now showing up in markets everywhere.

Tomatoes Stuffed with Roast Peppers, Shrimp, Capers, and Olives
(Serves 3, total cost is $8.40)

1 roasted red bell peppers, cut into 1" pieces
2 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
7 ounces cooked salad shrimp (see Note)
1 Tablespoons capers
2 Tablespoons chopped black olives
Zest of ½ a lemon, grated
1 Tablespoon chopped parsley
3 large tomatoes
½ teaspoon Salt, divided
½ teaspoon Pepper, divided

Mix together roasted red pepper, oil, shrimp, capers, olives, lemon zest, parsley, ¼ teaspoon salt and ¼ teaspoon pepper.

Cut off the top of each tomato. Use a paring knife to cut up the center of the tomato, being careful not to cut through the outer wall. Remove the center and seeds with a teaspoon. Season the inside of the tomatoes with the remaining ¼ teaspoon salt and ¼ teaspoon pepper. Fill the cavities with the shrimp mixture. Arrange in a shallow baking dish and bake in a preheated oven at 350° for 25 minutes, or until the tomatoes are a little soft.

Serve with crusty bread to soak up the delicious juices.

Note: A 6-7 ounce can of tuna, drained and flaked, can be substituted for the salad shrimp

* Rick Bayless is a chef in Chicago who is well-known for his deep and broad knowledge of Mexican cuisine. He has a show on PBS (highly recommended) and many excellent cookbooks. If you want to learn how to cook real Mexican food, he is your guy.