smitten kitchen

Have you ever eaten, like, a lot of cabbage over a few week period? I mean, a lot a lot. More cabbage than most people eat in two years, a lot. Well, thank goodness my cabbage-patching was not for nothing as my second NPR Kitchen Window column is up today about, you guessed it, coleslaw. (The first one, in March, was about Russian Zakuski.)

I have to admit that I am particularly pleased with these recipes, though I know that it is silly that it should warrant a confessional. On this site, I have published a couple coleslaw variations over the last year (an Indian-spiced, updated classic, and a green onion version), but I knew there was so much more out there. This article forced me to attack some of the ideas I have had brewing, though I simply can’t condone eating them in the frequency and quantity that we have.

Recipes on NPR include:

• Blue Cheese Coleslaw
• Napa Cabbage and Sesame Seed Slaw
• Spicy Radicchio Slaw with Pecans
• Pickled Coleslaw (a.k.a. my take on Zabar’s Health Salad I promised you way back when)

May your coleslaws never lack luster again!

Elsewhere: Coleslaw: You Could be a Star

Update, wholly unrelated: You know you have truly *arrived* (I kid) when your hosting service emails you to tell you that you’re getting too fat and they had to air lift you to another server. I’m not sure if anyone else would have noticed, but load times have been very sluggish lately, and this site has been down more than once, not including the time Alex and I decided it would be fun to delete it altogether. I am hoping this will be the end of the problems. And now, back to the roughage!

Adding to my infinite list of gastronomical oddities–I consider meat a side dish, cilantro tastes like dirt to me, I don’t drink tea and the only seafood I can stand is mussels–Alex and I finally ate at Mario Batali’s heroical West Village gastropub, The Spotted Pig, two weekends ago and all I’ve been able to talk about since were the salads.

With house-cured bresaola, proscuitto and various homemade sausages on the menu, it’s not named after swine for nothing. And while these are not to be overlooked, the salads were something of a symphony. I’ve said before that I don’t go to fuss-worthy restaurants because I fancy myself some sort of in-the-know foodie; I go for inspiration. Restaurants that don’t give me any new ideas for the Smitten Kitchen rarely get revisits.

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I’ve had a minor fixation with Israeli couscous, the larger, more pearl-like variety of couscous, since my first year of graduate school. A friend of one of my housemates who was working as a live-in nanny-slash-cook for a wealthy family in Bethesda, brought over some leftovers from the family’s dinner and what was this? This smattering of white polka dots through a tangle of greens and vegetables? You call it couscous, too? Why has nobody told me about this before!

Of course, back then I could barely find it anywhere, except occasionally at the Fresh Fields in upper Georgetown where they had those bins which I still miss today when I’m forced to buy half a pound of pecans when I need a half-cup. But even there, Israeli couscous was something of an enigma.

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Is there anything bursting with more flag-draped-weathered-barn American nostalgia than potato salad? How about a recipe from Rosanne Cash, daughter of the late Johnny Cash? It really adds to the experience if you sing “Walk the Line” off-key in the kitchen while your husband grimaces in the next room as your chop your eggs and pickles. And it doesn’t get any better than bringing it in a big old bucket to a 4th of July barbeque.

I know I told you just two weeks ago what our favorite potato salad was but as it turns out, I’ve got room in my allegiances for another. Though this may be the classic potato salad most people grew up with, I had never tried it before yesterday, driven away by the mysterious glop of it all. But if you make it yourself, there’s no smoke-and-mirrors to it, just everything but the kitchen sink: big chunks of red skinned potatoes, cubes of hardboiled eggs, slivered celery, diced onion, a few pinches of free dill and the dreamy dressing trifecta, vinegar, mayo and mustard.

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First I talked about madeleines, and although they’re lovely (though mine were less so), they don’t exactly have a high originality quotient. Then I totally side-stepped my week of non-cooking by throwing some “new feature” at you, and now, well now I’m going to tell you that you can make a salad out of cucumbers, tomatoes and onions. And I know you’ve got to be thinking: you don’t say!

Although on another week–perhaps one without heaps of barbeques for all that red, white and boom spread about–I might skip over the simple Israeli Salad, I know that if you’re still looking for that easier-than-pie dish to bring to a pot-luck barbeque tomorrow, we really need to talk. Israeli Salad isn’t just as dish, as much as it is a palette to build your salad dreams upon.

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