I want a salad.

I had salad for lunch today. I had two salads for dinner last night. All I want to eat is salad, and it's not even that hot out. But salad!

I went to the store and got butter lettuce and tomatoes and carrots and mushrooms and avocados and cucumber and some fairly extravagant organic mesclun mix that was on sale for $2.50/lb. Then I made salads.

Avocado and tomato salad

avocado
tomato
a little salt

Peel and chop the avocado. Don't peel but also chop the tomato. Put it in a bowl with a sprinkle of salt, and maybe a little lemon juice if you're not going to eat everything instantly. Stir it up and eat it instantly. Instantly!!

I was excited about this one because of the heirloom tomatoes. The yellow one was a plum variety with nearly solid flesh inside. The red one, though, could almost have been a bell pepper when you looked at structure. The seeds nearly fell out of the tomato when I cut it up. It would have been great for stuffing with something like cold rice and spinach salad, or something like cottage cheese and mint.

Greens and feta salad

mesclun mix/other lettuce
mild feta
vinaigrette, homemade or not

Wash and tear up some greens; put a handful of them in your bowl. Add as many feta crumbles as you like. I'm pretty sensitive to any feta but the absolute mildest, so I used only a tiny bit. Add vinaigrette, stir it up, and eat it also instantly.

This is a pretty classic, ordinary salad, but it was really good. I had another white peach with it.

Afterward we sat around eating raspberries and more salad leaves out of the bag. Tonight I plan to eat even more salad. Salad.

Is it soup? Is it sauce?

Today on Eileen Chef, we'll show you how to whip up a tasty tomato soup with pureed garlic and mushrooms. I mean, we'll show you how to concoct a hearty, flavorful sauce filled with roasted vegetables. I mean, it'll be awesome.

Tomato soup with roasted business
I mean, actually it's
Gemelli with hearty tomato sauce

head of garlic
half an onion
tomatoes/tomato puree
mushrooms
red pepper
olive oil
salt, pepper, basil, oregano, paprika
parmesan/other hard grating cheese
for pasta: gemelli/other pasta
for soup: lots of croutons

Basic plan: roast vegetables while cooking tomatoes on the stovetop. Puree it all together. Serve with pasta or croutons. Come to think of it, why not serve with pasta and croutons? Texturally, that would probably be pretty awesome. Then you could also have a gigantic salad.

Ok! For the roast, get a handful of mushrooms and pull out their stems. I used six. Stuff each mushroom cap with a wedge of peeled, smashed garlic. Put all the mushrooms, their stems, and a bunch of diced red pepper in a reasonable roasting dish with a couple slugs of olive oil. I used a pyrex bread pan. Add some more smashed garlic for good measure; use about half the head. Put your vegetables in to roast slowly, at about 325F.

Next, peel and smash whatever's left of your head of garlic. Throw it in a big, deep saute pan or soup pot over medium heat. Dice up some onion and add it too. Spice with your basil, oregano, and paprika. Add some olive oil, stir it up, and let it all cook slowly until the onion and garlic is soft and golden.

Add a bunch of tomatoes. You can use canned or fresh, whatever you have around, as long as it's good quality. I used a 24-oz can of Glen Muir fire roasted tomatoes, which I'd gotten on sale due to various foodblog hype. Let me just say this was a bad idea. The smell and taste of these strongly suggest chemical additives instead of actual roasting, and neither went away over the course of cooking. The end result was not terrible, but it wasn't anywhere near as good as it would have been with real tomato-flavored tomatoes. Use good tomatoes!

So add tomatoes, stir, and reduce everything together.

Check on the roast and stir it up every once in a while.

Hang around in the kitchen having a glass of wine and inhaling all the deliciousness. It'll be nice.

The roast should be roasty and the tomatoes at least partly reduced somewhere near the same time. When both these conditions are true, take the roast out of the oven and scrape its contents into the tomatoes. Add some water stir, and bring the business to a simmer. Cook for a few minutes to let the flavors combine.

If you want a chunky sauce, you can stop here and serve over pasta. If you want a smooth sauce or soup, take the pan off the heat and let it cool for a minute or two. Then, if you have one, break out your immersion blender and blend everything until it's sufficiently pureed. You may need to add more water to let this work smoothly, but that's ok: you can just cook it off in a minute.

You can also use an actual blender, but in that case I'd let things cool off more before blending, and also work in batches. The immersion blender is the best idea ever.

Put the pureed sauce back on the heat, cook down to your desired thickness, and serve.

Soup: put it in a bowl, add a lot of garlic croutons (or parsley, or whatever sounds good) and eat.
Pasta: serve over pasta, with grated cheese if you like, and eat. I used a lot of cheese because I was trying to cover up the fake fire-roasted taste.

Eat a salad. Have the rest of the bottle of wine. Go to sleep sated and happy.

Eat a sandwich.

I do not get the issues some meat-eating people have with liverwurst. Foie gras is ok, right? It's not just ok, it's super-fancy! Pâté is considered super-fancy as well. And yet liverwurst, which is also a paste made of liver, and much better than any store-bought pâté I've ever had, somehow is considered gross. I bet it's because it has the word "wurst" in it.

Anyway. I grew up with liverwurst, and while I don't eat it very much now, I do want it occasionally. So when I saw a tiny $1.95 tube of herbed liverwurst at the store, I went ahead and got it.

The best liverwurst sandwiches have to have tomato. It's also pretty classic to have cream cheese. I didn't have any tomato or cream cheese this time, but I did have a plethora of other fine business. The most important part is making sure there's enough crispy, juicy vegetable to balance out the heavy, rich liverwurst. Taste your liverwurst and decide which of your vegetables would be good.

One liverwurst sandwich

bread (baguette segment)
liverwurst or braunschweiger (same difference)
crumbled mild feta
romaine
fresh basil leaves
red pepper
salt and pepper

Cut the baguette in half. Spread each half with liverwurst. Sometimes you'll get a liverwurst hard enough to slice, so in that case you can just slice it. Mine was nice and spreadable, so I spread it.

Cut up the rest of the business and layer it over the liverwurst. The hardest part for me was keeping the feta crumbles from rolling everywhere. To solve this, I pressed them into the liverwurst, where they stuck. It's definitely handy to have a sticky base in this situation.

Put the halves of the sandwich together and eat it.

Liverwurst is deep and rich, so if you want wine, have red.

What, you're not having wine because sandwiches are for lunch? Why not? This is the perfect picnic food, and you know how well wine goes with picnics. I would go so far as to make an entire baguette into awesome sandwich, wrap it up, cut it in sections, and have a plethora of sandwiches, all with red wine. Then you can hike up the street, spread out your blanket, and eat it all, lounging in the grass at a safe distance from the yelling kids on the soccer field.

Kiwi strawberry peach kiwi

Apparently all I want to eat this summer is exotic and fragile fruit. Gold kiwi!

These were exciting, especially since they're much smoother and less skin-issue-provoking than normal fuzzy green kiwi. I peeled them without my hands starting to itch! I ate them with no reaction whatever from my lips! Usually I don't eat kiwi because I have sensitive skin and it's just too much work to avoid the pain. With these, though, everything was fine. I'm going to eat them until they're gone.

The gold kiwi was a little sweeter than the usual sharp green kiwi, and a little more smoothly textured. It went really well cut up with a bowl of strawberries. We ate the entire gold kiwi supply in one go.

Of course we eat green kiwi too. I can take it! RARGH!

This time I cut it up with a white peach. I cut off the kiwi skin, ran the fruit and knife in cold water to get off any last vestiges of irritant, then cut the kiwi into pieces. The white peaches have some fuzz too, but I don't feel any need to peel them, since it's minimal and doesn't provoke any allergic reactions. In contrast, I don't eat yellow fuzzy peaches without painfully peeling each slice. This means there are generally a lot of nectarines at our house.

Man, I did not mean for this to turn into an entry about skin irritants. It is about fruit! The summer fruit is dripping and delicious; eat it!

Tahini-miso tofu salad

Playing around with food is great.

I'd been thinking about using the Vcon tahini-miso salad dressing as a marinade for a few days. Since I was making it a marinade instead of a creamy dressing, I used enough water to keep things good and liquid. I also used red miso instead of the requested white, because that's what we had. So I marinated the tofu, seared it, steamed some vegetables with it, and poured the whole business on top of a plate of greens. It was one of the best salads I've ever eaten.

Also, since the dressing as marinade gets soaked up by the tofu, you can make the salad itself with no dressing. MIND-BOGGLING.

Dressingless dressed tofu salad

firm nigari tofu
red miso
tahini
water
carrot, mushroom, red pepper, summer squash, etc.
romaine or other lettuce

Mix equal parts tahini and miso together with a fork. I didn't really measure, just used huge heaping spoonfuls for each. The two should mix easily into a smooth paste. Add at least double their volume in water and whisk until the paste is dissolved.

Cut your tofu into cubes, or whatever small salady shape you like. You could also use tempeh or chicken or fish or whatever sounds good with tahini-miso business. I plan on doing some eggplant experiments in the very near future.

Throw the cubes into the miso-tahini business and let them soak. I ended up letting mine soak overnight, which worked fine. An hour will work well too.

Heat a wide frying pan with a lid, throw in the tofu, and sear on all sides. I kept tossing mine around every few minutes, instead of trying to turn each individual piece to get the whitest side down. It should take somewhere between five and ten minutes (depending on how good your stove is) to get things nice and brown.

While the tofu is cooking, prep the other salad vegetables. For my main salad, I peeled and chopped half a carrot, diced half a red pepper, and chunked a handful of mushrooms. On the second batch, for John, I chopped up a small globe summer squash instead of the mushrooms. You can use any other vegetable that will steam to doneness easily: green beans definitely sound like a good idea. Use as many vegetables as you want.

For the base, I just washed and chopped a lot of romaine and threw it on a plate. You can use any leaves you want, but a crisper lettuce will stand up best to the heat of the cooked salad.

When the tofu is seared, scrape all your steaming vegetables into the pan, add a quarter cup or so of water, and clap the lid over everything. Let it cook for about five minutes, shaking or stirring occasionally. Then take the lid off the pan and let it sit for a minute, so any extra moisture evaporates. Take the pan off the heat and let it cool a little, so you don't wilt all the lettuce instantly. Then pour the pan contents over your plate of lettuce.

Eat. Oh man, isn't it great?

A salad this great demands wine. I had been pretty excited about even finding this business: Frey organic no-sulfide-added sauvignon blanc. However, it was not an especially good wine. The actual mouth taste was ok, but the aftertaste was pretty bad. We drank it anyway, as it wasn't That bad, but it definitely wasn't as good as I would've liked it to be.

Some better sauvignon blancs to try:
- Zolo, Argentina: sharp and crisp. We drink this all summer.
- Veramonte, Chile: sharp and thin, a little harsh.
- Page Mill, CA: sweeter and more rounded.
- Cartlidge & Browne, CA: this one's actually organic too, and good.

And that's the limit of my wine knowledge.