shaved vegetable salad

shaved vegetable salad, originally uploaded by michele wynne.

One of the most valuable lessons (so far) I learned in cooking class at 18 Reasons (or The Big Kitchen as like to call it), is the layered salad. This taste-bud tantalizing method of salad building can turn a mountain of veg into an empty plate and a full belly in no time. I never tire of these.

The beauty of this method is that the variety of textures and flavors make each bite taste different- your palate is continuously engaged, as opposed to tossing everything together with your dressing resulting in a salad that can get boring before it's been finished. This is insanely good. By the time I finished building this it was mountainous. I was reading a book while eating and it seemed quite suddenly my plate was empty.

This Shaved Fennel Salad was a riff on the Buttermilk Farro Salad (link below) I made last week from 101 Cookbooks. I had some of those same veggies left and lots of the buttermilk dressing to use up (which I mixed with a little home made mayo). Build the salad on a large plate or a platter, using 1/2 of each ingredient then repeating the layers. This particular salad went down like this:

arugula

shaved fennel

shaved black Spanish radish

shaved French breakfast radishes

shaved zucchini coins

sliced toasted almonds

chopped dried cranberries

crumbled goat cheese

buttermilk dressing
salt
pepper

Depending on whether the salad is dinner for one or one course of a larger gathering you can scale the number of ingredients up or down.

-Some kind of green: arugula, baby spinach, kale, little gems, spring mix

-2 or 3 (at the most) shaved, thinly sliced or grated vegetables

-toasted nuts

-fruit for sweetness-golden raisins or other dried fruit or mangoes or apples or mandarins

-cheese-goat, feta, shaved parmesan or blue cheese...I like salty cheeses

-salt

-pepper

-dressing drizzled lightly-lemon juice & olive oil work just fine.
Remember to build the salad in two layers.

I've also added avocado or sliced hard boiled eggs to make this a meal.

Potato Fennel Gratin

Potato Fennel Gratin, originally uploaded by riptideredsf.

This dish of dreamy, creamy, cheese slathered potatoes is as off-the-hook good as this picture is bad. This is the fate of night-time cookery in the little kitchen. The first bite is taken, then another and before I know it, the chances of anything sticking around until the next morning for the optimal photo-op is veryveryvery slim. I've found this to be a very good thing.
The Barefoot Contessa gets the credit for this little kitchen keeper.

<insert rant> I don't have much to do with her because more often than not, I'm put off by some elusive ingredient. She makes my pantry seem inadequate. She's a big tease, luring me in with a Simple Tomato Soup  only to be turned away by my lack of saffron threads. Don't get me started on that truffle butter. I love/hate The Barefoot Contessa. A while back I went all ADD in the cookbook aisle at the library and came home with a big stack including Back to Basics. I flipped through the book and found myself, as expected, going all bi-polar, engaged then enraged (too strong of a word but it sounds good).  That ginormous showcase barn kitchen? Jeez...I shudder to think of the damage I could do to that, unless I had a team of assistants cleaning up after me. Shoot, I don't even have a Kitchen Aid, much less a dishwasher. There's that gorgeous patio where she (some hidden catering staff) serves her fabulous friends at a table that's bigger than my kitchen?  There she is trotting around those charming little shops in East Hampton arms loaded with tulips, vanilla beans and truffle oil...yes I'm green with envy<end rant>
But every now and again I stumble across one of her recipes that gets me all churned me up and I can think of doing nothing else.

This wasn't one of those times.

I found myself with a couple of sprouting potatoes and a sadly drying fennel bulb, crying out to become something wonderful STAT! I plugged "fennel" into my Google search and ultimately landed on this: Potato Fennel Gratin. It's from my other guilty pleasure, The Food Network.

But back to Back to Basics: It inspires. I easily and immediately bookmarked more than 10 recipes (that's my cookbook quota)...recipes that might actually have a place in my un-Hampton-y, tulip-less world.