Archive for February, 2012

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February 23, 2012

Salad of the sea


Before my kids were in school I remember parents of older kids telling me how much they like vacation days. The kids sleep in. Everyone eats breakfast in their pajamas. Then they might go on a family outing. A hike, maybe.

I couldn’t conceive of such pleasure. When the preschool was closed due to a holiday it meant time lost on my own projects; more hours to juggle the needs of a toddler and a preschooler. My daughter would complain (read: pout and refuse to budge) if I tried to take them hiking. I couldn’t wait to get everyone back into a routine.

But this year I guess we’ve turned the corner because the kids actually play together in their pj’s when there’s a holiday, building things like toy villages and Lego sculptures before their dad and I are awake.

Monday was one of these lazy, lovely mornings and afterward we took the kids to the Museum of Glass where we saw these exhibits. My favorite was a glass forest in the Glimmering Gone exhibition: layers of clear glass forming the likenesses of underbrush and trees with a mirrored river cutting through. Sublime! I would have stood there all morning if I’d been alone.

No cameras are allowed in the museum so I can’t show it to you, but I did catch an image of the kids near the entrance to the museum.


It was raining when we went in and also as we left, adding to the charm of being indoors among beautiful objects for the morning.

Because of all the showers this week, we’ve spent a lot of time indoors at home, too. And something that makes it cozy? Sea vegetables. Since we’re still waiting for the foraging season to begin, over the next few weeks we’ll turn our attention to different types of sea veggies.

As you’ll see in this week’s salad, sea vegetables often don’t require cooking. Rehydrate and – voila. You have salad. And they’re full of good stuff. Nutrients in sea vegetables – a laundry list of vitamins, minerals and trace elements – are highly bioavailable, meaning it’s easier for the body to absorb them than those in land plants.

Wakame is native to the California coast and that’s where the seaweed I used in today’s recipe came from. (I wrote about the company that harvests it once. You can go here and scroll down to the sea veggies article to find out a bit about the mindful, hardworking folks at Rising Tide Sea Vegetables.)

Sea vegetables may not be local in the strictest sense, but they’re wildcrafted and sourced on the West Coast. And since dried sea vegetables keep for a long period of time, they’re something to keep on hand in the cupboard. You never know when you might want a comforting broth or simple salad on a rainy day.


Salad of the Sea
by Chie

Wakame is traditionally used in miso soup, and in a summer salad
with cucumbers. This is a refreshing, mineral-rich salad with Asian
flavors. I love to have this on hand as a side dish.

½ c dried wakame seaweed
3 T tamari
2 T extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 T apple cider vinegar
juice of ½  – 1 lemon
1 tsp maple syrup (optional)
1 T ginger, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
½ bunch green onions, thinly sliced
½ – 1 bunch cilantro, stemmed and chopped
½ – 1 bunch Italian parsley, stemmed and chopped
1 tsp Celtic sea salt
¼ c toasted brown sesame seeds, ground

Soak the wakame in water to rehydrate, about 15 minutes.
Drain and chop into bite-sized pieces.
Mix the rest of the ingredients in a medium bowl and stir in the wakame.

Adjust the amount of cilantro and parsley depending on how
much green you like in your salad. I like to add finely chopped daikon
radish, carrots or celery for more color, crunch, vitamins and flavor.

Allow the flavors to marry for an hour or so. Enjoy!

Posted in Recipes, Winter Vegetables | 18 Comments »

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February 16, 2012

Rutabaga and hijiki salad

We only got around to pruning half our crabapple tree before the snowstorm hit. But the skies have been clear all week, setting the un-pruned suckers into relief against the now-blue, now-white sky. No more snow or rain as an excuse: get out the pruners! It’s almost spring, for heaven’s sake.

But even though I need to prune like it’s going to be spring tomorrow and more buds appear every day, we’re not there yet. Not quite.

We’re still eating like it’s winter. The cellared stuff. The roots. And I’m amazed that we’ve made it halfway through February and, still, there are some roots I haven’t eaten yet this season.

Or ever. The closest I’ve come to eating a rutabaga was when I had to write about one for a 101 writing course my freshman year of college. It was one of those inane writing prompts fabricated to make you sit down and write. Describe a rutabaga. Two pages, double-spaced. Ready, go.

No. Wait. That was the year I should have written about a rutabaga. It was my freshman roommate who had to write about that, not me.

A few days before classes started, a sophomore told me that although everyone considered this writing class a requirement, it (hush, hush) wasn’t. You could totally get away with not signing up at all! No one would care one way or the other.

Not knowing that twenty years later I’d be punching out my thoughts on the keyboard every day, hitting my head full of aging neurons against the wall, I decided to prove I was my own person (no list of “Suggested Coursework” was going to influence me). I didn’t sign up for the course.

I congratulated myself when my roommate came back to our room one afternoon, flummoxed. “What’s a rutabaga?” she asked. “I have to go buy a rutabaga! Does Safeway even have them?” I had no idea so I shrugged and went back to reading The Iliad.

Do you have moments like this in your history? Times when you wish the older you could go back to the younger you and inhabit her body for the two minutes it took to fill out the card requesting classes for the upcoming semester? I do. I often wonder if taking that class would have turned me toward writing (maybe even food writing) earlier in my life, saving me from late nights full of painful sentence construction, or at least making them more lucrative. Every time I think about that rutabaga assignment – heck, every time I happen see one in the store – I think about the lost opportunity. Maybe that’s why I’ve never eaten one.

But history is made now. By the time you read this post, I will have bought a rutabaga and photographed it on the picnic table out back. I will have scrubbed its turnip-like skin and julienned it; mixed it with hijiki, lemon juice, cilantro. I will have eaten it and formed an opinion. And I will no longer be able to say that I’ve never written a word about a rutabaga.

Now that I’ve broken the ice, maybe there are some rutabaga-themed essays in my future. Or even a love poem. I’ll think on that one while I’m pruning.


Rutabaga and Hijiki Salad
by Chie

Rutabagas are mild and crunchy, perfect for this salad.
If you’d like a slightly different texture or sweetness,
they can be swapped for turnips or daikon radishes.
This is a great chop-and-toss salad to go along with your next meal.

1 medium rutabaga, scrubbed and julienned
1½  tsp sea salt
juice and zest of 1 lemon
¼ c hijiki seaweed, soaked in boiling water to rehydrate
3 T extra virgin olive oil or toasted sesame oil
½ – 1 bunch cilantro, chopped
pinch of ground cumin (optional)
toasted, ground sesame seeds


Toss all ingredients well and allow flavors
to marry for about 15 minutes.
Sprinkle with sesame seeds. Enjoy!

Posted in Recipes, Winter Vegetables | 17 Comments »

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February 9, 2012

Warm Kale Salad with Marinated Shiitakes

I think of mushrooms as a must-cook food. Sliced raw on salads they taste marginal, at best. And I have a slight paranoia about the ill effects of eating some of the more unusual varieties raw. Morels, for instance, must be cooked (and cooked thoroughly) to avoid “gastrointestinal distress.” Yikes. Shiitakes eaten raw can cause, in about 1 in 50 people, an itchy rash on the face and neck (more on this in a minute).

But let’s assume we’re not dealing with morels today (we’re not) and that you’re one of the 49. Or that you’re preparing plain old button mushrooms. Try a marinade. Marinating exploits the sponginess of raw mushrooms, a possibility I hadn’t considered before Chie told me about today’s recipe while we were on a walk in the sun the other day.

Speaking of which, this week we had a winter tease if I’ve ever seen one. I broke out my sunglasses and Chie and I peeled off our jackets as we were circling the lake. The spring-like weather nudged me to get outside with my camera, too. Before I get back to the issue at hand, here are a few images from a practice session with my new lens. These were taken in our front yard, where the plants seem convinced that it’s both winter and spring.

And there’s something else before we move on. I turned 40 this week. It’s strange to witness the softening of my features in the mirror, to discover which edges age is choosing to blur. But mostly I’m okay with the change, even looking forward to a decade my older friends tell me they recall with fondness. I foresee a time of taking better care of myself, risk-taking, acceptance and a richer understanding of people.

But enough about me. On to the cooking! Before we move to the recipe, I’ll note that sources I read recommend shiitakes be cooked in order to avoid the possibility of the rash I mentioned a moment ago. If you’re leery, sauté the mushrooms prior to marinating. That said, I went ahead and marinated them raw. As Chie promised when we talked about it on our sunny walk, they soak up the flavors of the tamari, vinegar and ginger and combine with the blanched kale for a warm salad that is itself somehow a perfect combination of winter and spring.

Warm Kale Salad with Marinated Shiitakes
by Chie

Eating shiitake mushrooms raw is something I started to do recently
after I met the man who owns Alpine Mushroom Company and
grows these healing fungi, Terry Bunce.

This salad was inspired by Joseph at Wobbly Cart Farming Collective.
He reminded me of blanching greens to make a simple, delicious, almost creamy dish.

½ lb shiitake mushrooms
1 bunch kale
sea salt
¼ c extra virgin olive oil
3 T tamari
2 -4 T apple cider vinegar
1 – 3 T ginger, peeled and grated
1 T raw honey

Bring a medium pot of water to a boil. Add a small handful of salt.
Meanwhile, whisk together the olive oil, tamari, vinegar, ginger and honey.


Stem and slice the mushrooms and add to the dressing. Set aside to marinate.

Wash, stem and chop the kale. Drop into the boiling salted water and blanch
for a minute or so, just to wilt the greens. Drain well.

Toss with the marinated mushrooms. Adjust for seasonings, serve warm and enjoy.

Posted in Recipes, Winter Vegetables | 33 Comments »

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February 2, 2012

Community potato salad

Sometimes on a Sunday night I’ll walk through the back door after a day away from home and see my daughter’s backpack on the floor, so crammed with stuff that it’s lying on its face, straps and back padding exposed.

It’s always a forehead-slapping moment. There’s a lunch bag with Friday’s meal half-eaten in there, and a thermos of milk that’s turned. Also a stack of crumpled papers from the previous week: finished worksheets, art projects, reminders, homework. Each requiring an action: file, recycle, tape to the wall, add to the calendar. So I sit down after the kids are in bed and sift.

One of the papers this week was a white sheet with the title of the school-wide theme for the year printed at the top, Sense of Place, and a list of questions to discuss at home, including the obvious starting point, “What does home mean to you?”

That’s an easy one. Home is finally normal again, I thought when I read it, a warm place where the washer works and the freezer stays cold. Where the last dirty blobs of snow on the driveway have melted away and the frost in the yard burns off by mid-morning.

But, as I said, that’s the easy answer. Home is figurative, too. Maybe even primarily figurative. This week I sat in a pew beneath a ceiling paneled in blond wood and heard a sentence that began, “You sit wallowing in all that old sourness…” (quoted from here). It was a moment of coming home, again and briefly, to myself. Sourness and disappointment tend to crop up again and again for me and they make the world a smaller and less possible place and isolate me from my pod of friends and family, my community – the people who make life engaging, challenging and, during the times when my heart is breaking, more bearable.

You may be wondering about the pensive mood I’m in this week and what all this has to do with food. An awful lot. Connecting with people over food is one of the ways I unpack my own neglected stuff and pick through it, one thing at a time. I think a lot while I’m mincing, boiling and combining foods and photographing them for you. And it’s a homecoming of sorts to cook with someone else, observing their work patterns in the kitchen, how exactly they grate a nub of ginger, what triggers them to dig through the fridge for some fresh tarragon.

This week Chie and I got together to cook, something we’re hoping to do more often, and it was fun and healing to talk and laugh and chop together, tasting as we went. She came up with this warm potato salad held together by a vinegar dressing. Which, in my current state of mind, is something more than coincidental. The sourness of the apple cider vinegar (something you couldn’t happily consume straight from, say, a shot glass) is mixed with oil and mustard, blending boiled potatoes and chopped vegetables into something more.


Community Potato Salad
by Chie

A mixture of red, yellow and purple potatoes (about 4 lbs.)
¼ onion, thinly sliced
2-3 ribs celery, sliced into moons or on the bias
4 small carrots, halved and thinly sliced on the bias
4 small green onions, finely chopped
1 apple, chopped into bite-sized pieces
2-3 leaves lacinato kale, finely chopped
scant 1-inch nub ginger, peeled and grated
a handful of flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
juice of 2 lemons
zest of 1 lemon

Dressing
½ cup olive oil
⅓ cup apple cider vinegar
1 ½ tsp spicy or Dijon mustard
2 cloves garlic, smashed to a paste
½ tsp Celtic sea salt
freshly ground black pepper

Fill a large pot with water, add enough salt to make the water taste briny and bring to a boil.

Scrub potatoes, cut into 1-inch cubes and lower into the water.
Cook until just soft but not falling apart.

While the potatoes boil, slice the onion and place in a bowl.
Salt the slices and toss to mix. Let stand for 10-15 minutes.

Whisk together the olive oil, vinegar, mustard, 1 tablespoon of the lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper.
Set aside. Prepare remaining ingredients.




Cover the onions with water to soak
until the rest of the ingredients are combined.

When the potatoes are done, drain, place in a large bowl
with the rest of the ingredients and toss with the dressing to mix well.
Adjust to taste with extra sea salt, pepper, lemon juice and vinegar.



Serve warm.

Posted in Recipes, Winter Vegetables | 10 Comments »

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