1 – Salads

My 9 Favorite Recipes of 2017

2017 has been quite a year, eh? We saw everything from a solar eclipse (estimated to have caused nearly $700 million in lost productivity), to the reveal of Chipotle queso (too grainy for my tastes) and the popularization of “unicorn” food items (yikes).

On a personal note, my family move from Florida to Virginia, and I’ve spent nearly every spare moment working on my new cookbook. I started a new assignment in the Navy, which will have me traveling quite a bit over the next couple of years; an exciting opportunity to eat my way around the globe.

Here on The Domestic Man, I released about 50 new recipes, bringing the site’s total recipe count to nearly 500. Some of the dishes were brand new inventions or favorites from my previous cookbooks, but most came from recipes I’m testing for the next book – a small preview of what’s to come. I’m really proud of this year’s crop of dishes, but I wanted to take a moment and highlight a few of my favorites. So without any further ado, let’s dig in.

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Beet Salad (Vinegret)

Every once in awhile, I get a big craving for beets. The craving doesn’t hit me often, but when it does, I typically turn to my Vinegret (винегрет) recipe from The Ancestral Table. So without further ado, here is the text from the book:

Vinegret is the name of a Russian salad that is likely not of Russian origin, but rather borrowed from German or Scandinavian cuisine. In traditional Russian cuisine, salads were pretty rare. Vinegret is often cited as the first Russian salad, first mentioned in the 19th century.

Another Russian favorite is Olivier salad, which has a much more interesting history. It was invented by Lucien Olivier, a Belgian chef working in Moscow in the 1860s. The original recipe was a closely held secret and was never truly duplicated. Documents reveal that the salad likely included caviar, crawfish tails, aspic, and veal tongue. Over the years, these rare ingredients were replaced by common ones. Instructions for making Olivier Salad are also found below, as the method is similar.

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Salad Shirazi (Persian Cucumber and Tomato Salad)

Salad Shirazi is a herb and vegetable salad from the southern Iranian city of Shiraz. It’s enjoyed year-round as a side dish, but is often served as a full meal during the hot summer months. While the vegetables are often diced – giving them an appearance not unlike Pico de Gallo – I have found that using larger chunks give each ingredient a bit more distinction, and results in a livelier eating experience.

There isn’t much to this recipe; theoretically, you could just throw all of the ingredients together and chow down. But I prefer to soak the onions in cold water first, which removes some astringency, and to salt the tomatoes and cucumbers to leech out a bit of their juice. That way, most of the salad’s moisture comes from more flavorful sources, like olive oil and lime juice.

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Wedge Salad

Hey folks, we’re going to enjoy a short, simple dish this week. I’m in the middle of prep for a two-week stretch of recipe development, hopefully my last big push in the kitchen before I focus on writing other parts of my next book!

I think there’s something unfairly simple about wedge salads. They’re a cinch to put together at home, but I often find myself ordering them at restaurants, despite the fact that I’m paying someone to simply chop a head of lettuce into quarters. This week’s recipe is the classic preparation of the dish, which is wonderful in its ease and approachability; for something a little more challenging, I encourage you to check out my Muffuletta Wedge Salad recipe from last year.

A little history on wedge salads, from The Ancestral Table:

Salads served wedge-style date back to the 1910s and reached peak popularity in the 1960s. Iceberg lettuce, the staple lettuce used in this dish, has slowly been replaced by leaf lettuces over the years, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for this crispy, blank-canvas lettuce; it stays fresher longer than leaf lettuces and pairs better with creamy dressings and heavier toppings, as in this recipe.

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Guineitos en Escabeche (Pickled Green Bananas)

One of my new favorite discoveries while developing recipes for my next cookbook is the versatility of green bananas.

I’m definitely comfortable cooking with plantains, both as a hearty side (see: Mofongo and Mangú) or as a complement to dishes like Jerk Chicken, Picadillo Cubano, and Ital Stew. As I started to dig a bit more deeply into Caribbean cuisines, I grew to appreciate the simplicity of just grabbing a few unripe bananas and giving them a quick boil – their texture is not unlike potatoes, but with a rib-sticking quality that is maybe a tiny bit more satisfying than your typical boiled spuds. They even do well in a cold salad, like this week’s recipe.

Guineitos en Escabeche (Pickled Green Bananas) is an excellent example of how you can take seemingly discordant ingredients – bananas, onion, garlic, olives, and vinegar – and come up with something that blends together pleasantly (and unexpectedly). Escabeche is a process of marinating food in a vinegar solution, most commonly used to preserve delicate fish in the Mediterranean and Latin America. For this dish, which is most associated with Puerto Rico, bananas take the center stage; try it as a side for your next summer cookout!

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Green Papaya Salad

Summer is definitely here this week – today is supposed to be the hottest day of the year, here in Virginia. It just so happens that today is also the day that the movers are delivering all 10k pounds of our household goods, so we’ve set aside pitchers of cold water, lemonade, and iced tea to help everyone get through the day.

Sometimes, a nice long sweaty workday on a hot day feels good – especially when paired with a dip in cold water afterwards. In the same sense, many people like spicy foods on a hot day, and in honor of that sentiment, I’m posting my Green Papaya Salad recipe from Paleo Takeout. From the book:

It’s not often that you would associate a salad with unripe fruit, dried shrimp, or spiciness, but that’s basically what you experience with Green Papaya Salad. The hardest ingredient to find for this dish is the green papaya itself, but if you have a local Asian market nearby, it will likely carry them.

There are a couple adjustments I made for this recipe, to accommodate a Western palate (crushed red peppers instead of scorching bird’s eye chiles), Western supermarkets (fresh green beans instead of yardlong beans), and Paleo-friendly nutrition (macadamia nuts instead of peanuts). If you have access to the original ingredients, and the desire to stay true to the original recipe, go for it!

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Muffuletta Wedge Salad

Let me start this post by acknowledging that this recipe title is a second-order misnomer. You see, combining the words “muffuletta” and “wedge salad”, at face value, is just preposterous. For those of you who know their Sicilian bread history, muffuletta is a large, round, and sturdy bread not unlike focaccia. It was brought to the United States by Italian immigrants, who created a sandwich that bears this same name.

The story goes that Italian-Americans living in New Orleans tired of having to manage a whole plate of pickled vegetables, meat, cheese, and muffuletta bread, so they started throwing it all together for the sake of convenience, and the muffuletta sandwich was born. Today, the signature traits of this sandwich include an olive salad (sometimes mixed with chopped giardiniera pickled vegetables like carrots and cauliflower) and layers of Italian ham, salami, and provolone cheese. Some versions include other meats, like mortadella (similar to bologna), or other cheeses like mozzarella.

So for today’s recipe, not only am I not sharing a bread recipe, I’m also not sharing a sandwich recipe (hence the second-order misnomer). Instead, I wanted to combine the rich and potent flavors of the muffuletta sandwich with the unmistakable crispness and convenience of a wedge salad. After all, what could be easier than making a salad that only requires minimal chopping? Another added bonus of this method: the olive oil used to flavor the olive salad doubles as a salad dressing, making this recipe a simple, two-step process. Sure, it’s not as convenient as a one-handed sandwich, but still – pretty convenient.

Coincidentally, I’m making my first trip to Sicily in a couple weeks, so I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for muffuletta bread while there.

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Vietnamese Chicken and Cabbage Salad

Summer’s heat is finally, lazily, starting to wane here in NW Florida; but it’s nowhere near stew season yet. And judging from recent reports, the rest of the US is experiencing some pretty hot weather, so you’re likely not ready to crank on the oven right now, either. So I think it’s the perfect time to share my Gỏi Gà (Vietnamese Chicken and Cabbage Salad) recipe.

Gỏi is the common salad dish in Southern Vietnam (called Nộm in Northern Vietnam), with Gỏi Gà, its chicken variety, being the most popular. While many shredded chicken salad recipes call for boiled chicken, I just can’t stomach the idea of boiling chicken – it seems like such an impersonal way to prepare meat, and it runs the risk of creating a dry, mealy texture.

I respect the reason why boiled chicken is used for shredding, as the water-saturated chicken is easy to break apart. But today, we’ll employ a technique I first learned in a restaurant job, nearly 20 years ago, to get the best of both worlds: we’ll grill the chicken to give it a nice crust and flavor, then dunk it in an ice water bath to cool. This has a secondary effect of preventing the grilled chicken from shrinking, making it a breeze to shred.

One of my favorite aspects of this recipe is that nothing goes to waste. For example, we’ll fry up some shallots and garlic as a salad topping, then cool and use the oil to create the salad dressing – infused with toasted shallot and garlic flavor.

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Winter Slaw

When one blogs about their food experiences, some patterns start to show. For example, over the past 5+ years writing for this blog, I’ve only posted four salad recipes. That’s not because I think salads aren’t worth making, but rather, it’s an indication of how I view salads: as something you throw together using the vegetables available in your crisper, or on your counter.

In truth, there is still some merit to writing salad recipes. Sometimes, it’s good to have a solid blueprint for future cooking endeavors. Case in point is this Winter Slaw, modeled after European-style cabbage salads.

Out of the countries who count their cabbage intake, Russians consume the most – about 40 pounds per person, compared to 9 pounds per person in the United States. Cabbage often carries a bad reputation, since some folks experience a negative response after eating it; this is due to the trisaccharide raffinose, which is found in cabbage, beans, broccoli, and asparagus. That gassiness is caused by the trisaccharide fermenting in your lower intestine.

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Grilled Romaine Salad

A few weeks back, my friend Stacy from Paleo Parents sent a text to me and our mutual friend, Jennifer from Predominantly Paleo, that went something like this: “Hey, I want to recreate this Red Robin Banzai Burger that I’ve loved for years and we should do a collaborative project because you two are pretty cool.” I liked the idea of teaming up with some other bloggers for something new, and I’m always game for recreating particular flavors (I did write a book of restaurant recreations, after all). So I jumped into the game.

While most folks associate Red Robin with burgers, they have an impressive selection of salads as well. This Caeser-dressed and fire-grilled salad, affectionately called “Insane Romaine”, is a favorite of mine, and I thought this was a great opportunity to recreate their dish plus finally try my hand at a homemade Caesar salad dressing.

Once we had our project in mind, we started talking to Chosen Foods, who recently debuted their avocado oil-based mayonnaise, and decided to take the collaboration one step further: we all featured the mayo in our recipes, too. Be sure to check the bottom of this post for the other two dishes included in our Red Robin recreation progressive dinner: the aforementioned Banzai Burgers plus some crispy fries and “Campfire Sauce”.

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