So I’ve been self soothing by stocking up on groceries, but then I ended up with too many types of vegetables that require intensive prep in order to turn into food and not enough easy meals.
There’s still three quarters of a kabocha squash, two ears of corn, and some tomatillos to reckon with. But those are for another day.
Today I was gardening and it was very hot and I didn’t really want to cook much. Then I remembered I had lettuce! So this salad is based on one head of romaine lettuce, cleaned and cut up.
Then I had bought new carrots, but I still had three old carrots. So I pulled those out and sliced them up for pickling (quick pickle with a dried chili and seasoned rice wine vinegar) and the slices that weren’t pretty for cut a little more finely and added to the salad.
Then I pulled out the package of small Persian cucumbers. I really do like them more than other cucumbers and they’ve been pretty cheap recently, but they barely last a week in the refrigerator. So I washed all the ones I haven’t eaten (4) and sliced them. I also got out a red onion and thinly sliced half of one. Most of the slices I pickled separately with red wine vinegar, but I added some to the cucumbers for extra flavor. And then all the parts of the cucumber that were a little soft but still good went into the salad.
I cleaned and finely sliced one scallion and added it to the salad.
I grabbed the third ear of corn and cleaned it. The husks compost better if you slice them across the grain a few times. Then I sliced off about half of the kernels and put them into the salad raw. But that was enough raw corn, and I wasn’t sure how to save half an ear of corn like that. So I took a pat of butter and thinly sliced some of the remaining purple onion and put that to cook while I sliced off the rest of the kernels. My mother would have also taken the back of her knife and scraped it all of the corn milk, too, but I just gnawed on the corn cob while I was working. Anyway, the remaining corn kernels then went into the butter and onion and was cooked until just soft and hot before being added to the salad.
But wait, there’s more!
I’d bought a little of the good mozzarella (good within the category of grocery store mass produced cheese), so I cubed that and added it on top.
And I had some soft boiled eggs, so I peeled one and put it in hot water to both wash off any tiny shell crumbs and to take the chill off.
But then I also decided to cook some leftover thinly sliced (hot pot style) fatty beef that I’d gotten from the Asian market. Instead of thawing and unrolling them, I just put them in the hot skillet as chunks – they still cooked through just fine.
And that was everything… except I had no plan for salad dressing. But I did have a pan with a couple Tablespoons of beef fat that had rendered off, so I thought about the Pennsylvania Dutch bacon fat dressing, and figured I might as well improvise. So I whacked a Tablespoon of Dijon mustard into the hot fat and stirred it around until it started to break down (not my plan, but that was what happened), and then I added some pickle sauce and stirred until it emulsified, and then poured it over the salad. And that worked really well! It had enough salt and brought everything together without feeling fatty.
Oh, and then I sliced the soft boiled eggs on top, which was really gilding the lily, but eggs don’t last forever.