 |
| Roasted squash salad with bacon and pumpkin seeds |
A trio of salads: Kale cobb salad, radicchio salad with blue cheese dressing, roasted squash salad with bacon
All of these salads were brought to you by winter: They combine sturdy ingredients into robust salads while we wait out the season where lettuce won't grow with grace. So instead, think kale, and its obliging partner, bacon. Radicchio and roasted squash. Greens with roasted squash AND bacon.
One of the salads was also brought to you by a combination of irritation and opportunity. Dave flagged a Huffington Post article alerting that there was an automatic opt-in for Gmail users that could allow Google access to your messages and attachments to train AI models. Ish. It shared instructions for the two places to turn off smart features that allow this harvesting, and since that seemed like something I don't want in place, I dutifully turned it off.
And then found out, of course, just what all is joined at the hip in smart features. I could possibly live with out grammar check or autospelling, but everything all in one email inbox? Ugh. Plus, they only let you tailor your inbox notifications if you enable smart features. Double ugh. That leaves you with the option of either opting out of most promotional email (gasp, how will I find out when Harney's and Penzey's have a sale when I need to stock up??) or risk missing an actually vital email amid all the crud.
So, for now, I've caved and am on a mission to kill down my overall inbox before I try again, opting out as I go. To say that I've never been an inbox-zero person for anything other than the equivalent in Slack is putting it mildly. My promotions box had ballooned to more than 17,000. I've now got that down below 2,500, but I'm loath to just kill out everything without looking through, because hello, recipes! Like the recipe for radicchio salad with blue cheese, below. Sure, I got the magazine in October, but it apparently didn't trigger my interest until I saw it promoted in my Gmail and remembered that I have both radicchio and gorgonzola in my frig that need using.
So I'm wading through the rest of the messages, and really irritated by one trend that can't be over soon enough: Promotional emails designed to trade on shame, guilt, anxiety and other malaise. I'm looking at you, Martha Stewart minions. Amid the potentially useful how-tos like how to make sour cream or reuse old sheets are these stink bombs:
9 hosting habits that guests secretly despise
12 sneaky reasons your home never feels completely clean
The 6 worst front door colors for curb appeal
7 home decor mistakes you should avoid
6 outdated garden trends
She's not alone in the negative phrasing, by any means. A quick search for "never" in my promotions box unearthed a trove of headlines destined for inbox trash. Colors to never paint your bathroom, etc. A cleaning step you always miss. "Wrong" is another big offender, along with "mistake," as in "You're making scrambled eggs wrong," instead of "how to make terrific scrambled eggs."
Along with umbrage. I have taken delight in killing out these joy zappers. I would paint my bathroom one of the never-do colors, but I've forgotten what they were already, because you should be able to paint your bathroom whatever color makes you happy.
But I did get at least one decent recipe out of the inbox before deleting it. Only 2,500 to go, and then it's off to zapping NextDoor rants.
Roasted squash salad with bacon and pumpkin seeds
Adapted from Cooking Light. I can't find the original recipe to link to but I believe it was in the October 2005 issue. If you’re looking to restore its lightness, go for cooking spray instead of olive oil, 1 slice of bacon instead of 3 and half the amount of dressing. Serves 6 as a side course or 4 as a main dish.
Ingredients
4 cups cubed and peeled butternut squash (1-inch cubes), half of a medium squash
2 teaspoons olive oil
3 tablespoons sherry vinegar
1½ teaspoon Dijon mustard
3 slices of bacon
1 medium shallot, minced
10 cups mixed salad greens, about 10 ounces
Toasted pumpkin seeds for garnish
Method
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Toss squash with olive oil and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Place on a rimmed baking sheet and roast for 30 minutes or until tender, stirring once half way through cooking time.
Combine vinegar, mustard and a sprinkling of salt and pepper in a large bowl.
Cook bacon until crisp. Remove from pan and chop into pieces when cool enough to handle. In bacon fat, cook shallots until just tender. Add shallots and some of the bacon fat to vinegar mixture in bowl and combine. Add greens to bowl and toss to mix.
Place mixed greens on plates. Top each plate with bacon and pumpkin seeds.
Rating: A nice tasty main course for lunch along with a bowl of soup. The bacon fat helps temper the sharp tang of the vinegar and mustard and the squash mellows things out. A fairly fast fix and reasonably pantry friendly, so I might pull this one out again.
Kale cobb salad
Adapted from Rachael Ray Magazine July/August 2015
Note: The original recipe specified turkey, but I no longer see cooked turkey breasts in stores the way I used to, so I opted for chicken. Depending on the size of your bacon, you may find like I did that three slices of bacon would overwhelm the salad. If your bacon is the thin spindly type, opt for three slices, but if it’s Midwestern farmers market-cut bacon, two is plenty. Serves 2 amply as a main dish salad.
Ingredients
¼ cup olive oil
¼ cup chopped shallots
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1 bunch kale, stems removed and leaves roughly chopped (Dinosaur kale works well here)
2-3 slices bacon, cooked and roughly chopped (see note)
2 ounces cooked turkey or chicken breast, chopped
2 hard-cooked eggs, chopped
1 avocado, chopped
2 tablespoons crumbled blue cheese (I used Deer Creek’s Blue Jay since I had part of a wedge to use up)
Method
Combine olive oil, shallots, vinegar and mustard in a small bowl. Add salt and pepper to taste. In a large bowl, combine kale leaves and all but about a tablespoon or so of the dressing. Massage in dressing to mix well and soften kale.
Put dressed kale on two plates. Top each with half the chopped bacon, turkey, eggs, avocado and blue cheese. Drizzle top with remaining dressing. Season top with cracked pepper.
Rating: Dave really liked it, possibly because it's a very sturdy salad. It didn't blow me away, but it is a good sort of salad for using up bits of things.
Radicchio salad with blue cheese dressing
From Bon Appetit, October 2025
Note: If you can’t find blanched hazelnuts, the recipe
suggests walnuts, pecans or almonds can also work. If you can only find raw hazelnuts and want to blanch them, heat a quart of water in a large saucepan. Bring to a
boil and add 1 tablespoon of baking soda per cup of hazelnuts. Once the fizz
dies down, add raw hazelnuts and boil for 4 minutes. Then drain the hazelnuts
and plunge into ice water. At this point, the skins will largely slip right
off. But while it’s easy, it’s still time-consuming, because it’s amazing how
many individual hazelnuts are in a half cup, so I highly recommend this as a
do-ahead step, Is it absolutely necessary to remove the skins? Technically, no,
they are edible. But once you try
toasting them you’ll find out that the skins are then sort of half on half off
and the loose skins aren’t generally the texture you’re looking for in most recipes. There are some recipes that call for
skin-on, but I’d advise following whatever the recipe suggests for blanched vs.
raw.
The recipe also suggests you can use a mix of the standard
reddish-purple radicchio we tend to see in stores locally with the less
commonly seen castelfranco radicchio, a very pretty burgundy-dappled green leaf
variety, which I might have to try from seed, because gosh, that’s lovely.
Ingredients
4 ounces blue cheese (I used Gorgonzola)
½ cup olive oil
¼ cup sherry vinegar
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon maple syrup
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
½ cup blanched whole hazelnuts
½ medium butternut squash, peeled, seeds removed and cut into 1-inch pieces
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon rosemary leaves, lightly chopped
¼ teaspoon salt
1 medium head radicchio, separated into leaves
1 medium head endive, leaves separated and torn if large
1 small shallot, thinly sliced, divided
Method
Combine blue cheese, olive oil, vinegar, syrup, Dijon
mustard and ½ teaspoon kosher salt and pepper in a blender or food processor.
Blend until smooth. (it will be thick-ish.) This can be made up to a couple of
days ahead; it stays emulsified.
Preheat oven to 400 degrees and toast blanched hazelnuts
(see note) on a rimmed baking sheet for 8 to 10 minutes until nuts pick up a
slight color, shaking once as it bakes. Set aside to cool.
Leave oven at 400 degrees. Toss squash cubes with 2
tablespoons olive oil, rosemary and ¼ teaspoon salt. Arrange in a single layer on
rimmed baking sheet and bake for 25 to 30 minutes until the cubes are tender and
pick up a bit of color.
Combine radicchio, endive and a pinch of salt and generous
grind of pepper in a large bowl. Add squash and about half each of the dressing, the
hazelnuts and the shallot slices, tossing to combine well and coat leaves with
dressing. Add more dressing if needed. Mound onto plates or a platter, then
garnish with remaining hazelnuts and shallots. You can pass the remaining
dressing on the side if you like or save for another use.
Rating: I would describe this recipe as better as a sum of its parts than any individual component. The blue cheese dressing is very unlike your standard white stuff out of a bottle. Unlike some dressings that you would marry, drench anything with or engage in other obsessive behavior, on its own it's interesting but not one you would write home about. It makes copious leftovers, and my first thought was what the heck am I going to use that for? But after trying the salad, I would say it works. The main impressions of the salad are crunchiness and really nice residual flavor. It's a good choice paired with an otherwise mild meal, like roasted pork tenderloin and brown rice. Not the lookiest of salads, and some of the flavors might be a little assertive for less adventuresome eaters, so I don't know that I'd trot this one out for company as is.
Leftover note: I opted for cutting down the fresh ingredients to make a more consumable portion, since I figured the mixed salad wouldn't really keep well. That meant I also had some roasted squash with rosemary leftover to use to make a pizza topping with goat cheese and bacon. As for that dressing, it takes sturdy greens like kale and shaved Brussels sprouts to stand up to it. It doesn't really lend itself to being repurposed as a dip or spread.
No comments:
Post a Comment