When in doubt, serve it on arugula!

I love my kitchen as much as the next food blogger. I feel very comfortable there. It’s normally very relaxing for me to cook.

But sometimes I just want dinner to be made. I want a dish that’s quick, flavorful, and simple.

I want a dish that I can make within the time it takes me to listen to one podcast of Car Talk.

This dish is that dish.

It can look a bit intimidating, especially if you aren’t use to cooking with a lot of Asian flavors. But really it’s dumb simple to make and utilizes one of my favorite kitchen tips!

Sesame Chicken Noodle Salad

Yield: Serves 4.

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Total Time: 35 minutes

Ingredients:

1 pound chicken breasts, seasoned with salt and pepper
1 red pepper, sliced
1 pound linguine
Vegetable oil
Arugula

Sesame Sauce:
2 inches fresh ginger, peeled and diced
1/3 cup peanut butter
1/3 cup rice wine vinegar
1/4 cup oyster sauce
1 tablespoon chili-garlic sauce
2 tablespoons sesame oil
1/2 cup pasta water (from linguine)

Directions:

1) Season chicken with salt and pepper. Add a drizzle of vegetable oil to a large skillet and heat over medium-high heat.

2) Sear chicken on both sides for about 4 minutes, then turn down heat and continue to cook chicken, flipping occasionally, until chicken is cooked through, about 12 minutes total cooking time.

3) Remove chicken from pan and slice into large chunks.

4) Start cooking pasta. When pasta is almost done, scoop out some pasta water.

5) Mix sauce ingredients in a bowl. Stir well. The sauce should be very smooth and silky. If it's very thick, add more pasta water.

6) Using same pan that you cooked the chicken in, add another drizzle of oil and add red peppers. Cook for just a few minutes over medium-high heat until veggies soften.

7) Add diced chicken back to skillet and stir in sesame sauce.

8) Drain pasta and add to skillet. Stir together to incorporate everything.

9) Serve sesame chicken salad on a bed of arugula.

Heavily adapted from a Cook's Country recipe.

The Sesame Sauce

When I say this meal can be intimidating, it’s mostly because I’m not sure a lot of people keep their pantries stocked with the stuff to make this sauce.

If you have to buy this stuff for the first time, it’ll involve lots of words you probably can’t pronounce and at least one panda bear.

Lots of jars...

Have no fear though. Once you hunt down all the jars that you need, the only actual work you need to do for the sauce besides measuring is peeling and dicing some ginger. Not rocket science!

There is one problem though. When you mix all these ingredients together, it will taste very good, but it’ll most likely be a bit on the lumpy side.

Don’t worry about this right now. We’ll fix it later!

A bit chunky...

The Chicken

The sauce is definitely the star of this show. You don’t have to use chicken for this dish if you wanted to make a vegetarian version. You could just toss the sauce with the noodles or use some seared tofu if you wanted.

I went the chicken route on this day though. Assuming you are using chicken, just season a few boneless skinless breasts with a good pinch of salt and pepper. I’m usually not a huge boneless skinless chicken fan, but it works well for this recipe.

Keep it simple.

In a large skillet, heat a drizzle of oil over medium high heat and once the pan is hot, add the chicken.

Sear the chicken for about 4 minutes per side. Then turn down the heat to medium and continue to cook until the chicken is cooked through, probably another 6 minutes or so. That of course will depend on how big your chicken breasts are.

Mine were on the smaller side.

Make sure it's cooked through...

Once the chicken is cooked through, scoop it out of the pan and slice it into big chunks.

You want the chicken to be visible in the final dish!

Big chunks work great.

Finishing the Dish

There’s just a few other things you’ll need to finish off this recipe. While it’s kind of optional, I recommend dicing up a red pepper and also getting some arugula ready.

Two quick veggies.

When it comes to the pasta for the dish, you can use almost any thin pasta. Spaghetti, linguine, angel hair… it would all work fine.

Fantastic Kitchen Tip Alert

Anytime you are making a sauce to go with pasta, one of the best sauce helpers you can have is the actual water that you cook the pasta in. Pasta water is starchy and salty and will help smooth out sauces and give them some body.

If you ever find yourself with a lumpy or lackluster sauce, try adding some pasta water to it.

In this case, we will add about 1/2 cup to that lumpy sauce that we mixed together earlier.

Wonderful water.

This will completely smooth out the sauce and make it perfect.

In the same skillet that you used to cook the chicken (no need to wash it even), add another drizzle of oil and then toss in your red peppers.

Cook them for a few minutes until they are soft and then add in your chicken. Pour your sauce over the whole thing!

Sauce is really smooth now.

Assuming you are decent at timing, hopefully your pasta is done as well right around this time.

Almost any pasta will work.

Then just stir your pasta in with the chicken and sauce.

It’ll look like a lot of sauce, but it’s just enough to coat all the stuff.

If at any point, the sauce gets too thick, just add a bit more pasta water to it and it’ll thin out.

This was my finished version!

All tossed together!

Now, you could just serve this in a big bowl, but I tried something a bit unconventional.

I served mine on arugula. This might sound strange to serve a pasta dish on greens, but it worked really well actually. The arugula is nice and peppery and holds up well to the strong sesame flavors.

And it makes for a pretty plate!

Pretty plate!

So there ya go!

If you can master the sauce, this dish is really simple to throw together, but really delivers in the flavor department.

Give it a shot if you’re in the market for a quick and easy dinner. And let’s be real… who isn’t in the market for a quick and easy dinner?

So colorful!

After a lot of holiday eating over the last week or so, Betsy discovered an interesting cleanse diet in the most recent Whole Living issue.

I’m not huge on body cleanses after a brief stint trying out The Master Cleanse many years ago. Frankly, I think most of them are BS.

But what I liked about this cleanse is that it really just reduces your diet to fruits and veggies for a few weeks. There’s no gimmicks or strange rituals. Just healthy food.

That said, I’ll be honest. I’m only dabbling in the cleanse. Betsy is doing it more intensely, but I’m cheating quite a bit.

I thought about actually doing the entire 3 week program and posting on it here, but a fair number of their recommended meals aren’t something that I would consider post-worthy here.

This is mainly because I’ll only post things that I like to actually eat. And while a kale, Romaine, and parsley smoothie (actual recipe from the diet) may be super-healthy, it tastes like cow vomit.

But, a few of the meals are very unique and I actually really enjoyed them. This is one of those meals. Not only is it completely delicious, but look at all those colors. Anytime a dish is that colorful, you can bet that it’s good for you.

Steamed Squash Salad

Yield: Serves 4.

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Total Time: 45 minutes

Ingredients:

1 bunch broccoli rabe
2 delicata squash, peeled and sliced
Sesame seeds, toasted
Salt and pepper

Slaw Mixture:
2 cups mixed greens
2 cups red cabbage, sliced thin (about 1/4 of a cabbage)
1/4 cup red onions, diced
1/4 cup carrots, shredded

Tahini Dressing:
1/2 cup tahini
1 lemon, juice only
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 garlic clove, chopped
1/2 teaspoon paprika
3/4 cup water

Helpful Equipment:
Mini food processor
Steamer

Directions:

1) In a food processor, mix together ingredients for tahini dressing. Blend until smooth.

2) For slaw, slice cabbage and red onion thinly. Toss with greens and carrots and set aside.

3) Wash broccoli rabe and cut off any large stems leaving leaves and florets.

4) For squash, peel squash and slice down the center. Scoop out seeds and then slice squash into 1/4 inch slices.

5) Set up a steamer and steam squash for 5-6 minutes.

6) Add broccoli rabe on top of squash and continue to steam for another 4 minutes.

7) Serve steamed veggies on a bed of the cabbage slaw. Drizzle with dressing and top with toasted sesame seeds and season with salt and pepper.

8) Leftovers are great in a wrap with a drizzle of hot sauce.

Adapted from Whole Living Jan 2012.

The Dressing

This dish has some really hearty vegetables in it, but the flavors would be a bit bland without this dressing. This is the star of the show in my opinion. It has a similar flavor to hummus, but is much more intense which is why you just need a drizzle of it.

Dressing stuff

You could use any food processor to make the dressing. I used my mini food processor which is getting a lot of use these days for me.

If you don’t have a food processor, I think you could still make this. Just mash up the garlic clove really well and whisk together all the ingredients. It’s thin enough that you should be able to mix it together okay without a food processor.

Pretty straightforward!

The Slaw

While the main veggies for this salad are steamed, there’s a really colorful slaw that the steamed veggies are served on.

The backbone is a nice fresh purple cabbage which I just sliced into tiny strips.

The purple and the red.

Combine the cabbage with some greens, red onion, and a handful of slivered carrots (my addition) and you’re all set.

I love the colors in this slaw.

Good lookin' slaw.

Steaming the Veggies

There are two veggies that you need to steam to finish off this salad. Both are kind of awkward and probably aren’t everyday ingredients for most people.

Stuff for steamin'

The first ingredient is Delicata squash. I’d never used these before this recipe but I found them pretty easy to prepare. You just need to peel them and then slice them in half and scoop out the seeds. These squash are more tender than other winter varieties so they are actually really easy to peel.

Once you have them peeled and cleaned, just slice them into 1/4 inch pieces. Don’t slice them too thin or they will just turn to mush as they steam. You want them to have some texture.

Peeled and sliced.

Broccoli rabe is the second ingredient that we will be steaming. While these guys look like baby broccoli, they actually aren’t related to broccoli at all.

You can steam the little florets and the leaves so just cut off any thick stems and give them a rinse.

Washed and ready.

Set up your steamer and add all your squash to the basket. Steam this for about 5 minutes. That won’t cook the squash all the way through, but it’ll get it started.

Here was my half-cooked squash.

After about five minutes.

After five minutes, just add all your broccoli rabe to the pot and put the lid back on! Since the rabe doesn’t take as long to steam, you can add it at the halfway point and then everything is done at once.

Full steamer!

After another 4-5 minutes all of your veggies will be perfectly steamed.

These were my finished veggies and they turned out great!

Pretty quick prep.

Serve the steamed veggies over the slaw with a drizzle of the tahini sauce and some roasted sesame seeds for a super-healthy and flavorful meal. The squash has almost a meaty texture but is slightly sweet and really filling.

Another serving option which I tried out on day two is to wrap all the ingredients with maybe a drizzle of hot sauce.

These would be perfect for a lunch option. Again… check out those great colors!

Really awesome wraps.

As I was writing this post I was browsing through the healthy category on the site and I have to say that I think this is one of the healthiest full meals I’ve ever made on Macheesmo.

But I didn’t post it because it was healthy. I posted it because I really loved eating it!

Hello delicous salad!

I can only think of two possible explanations why orzo exists:

1) Elaborate joke. ”Look at this huge rice! But wait… joke’s on you. It’s not rice. It’s pasta. I just blew your mind!”

2) Elaborate mistake. Something went horribly wrong with the spaghetti machine and orzo happened.

Anyway, I’m glad that this joke and/or mistake happened at some point in history because orzo is one of my favorite ways to make pasta salad. This was one of my most recent versions of the dish that went over really well. It’s very fresh and reasonably healthy for a pasta salad.

Greek Orzo Salad

Yield: Serves 6-8.

Prep Time: 30 minutes

Total Time: 50 minutes

Ingredients:

1 pound orzo pasta
1 cucumber, seeded, peeled, and diced
1 red pepper
1/2 red onion, diced
6 ounces feta cheese
1/2 cup slivered almonds
1 avocado, diced
Salt and pepper

Quick Lemon Dressing:
1 clove garlic
1 lemon, juice only
1/4 cup olive oil
Salt

Directions:

1) For dressing, dice garlic clove and mash it together with salt in a small bowl to form a rough paste. Then whisk in lemon juice and olive oil and season with salt. You might not need all of the dressing.

2) Cook orzo according to package.

3) Dice all the veggies finely. Take your time to make sure they are even-sized. For the cucumber, be sure to scoop out the seeds and peel it.

4) Mix orzo with veggies and crumble in feta cheese.

5) Drizzle on dressing and stir well. Start with half the dressing and add more if you want. It should be very lightly dressed.

6) Stir in chopped avocado and sliced almonds and season with salt and pepper.

7) Serve room temperature or chilled!

Orzo. What are you?

I like to imagine that at some point in history there was an old Italian mother who learned how to make orzo by hand. She then promptly relegated the task to her children.

Whatever your job is, be thankful that it’s not making orzo by hand.

I do not know how you are made.

Luckily, orzo is much easier to cook than to make. Just boil it like you would any pasta, in a large pot of salted water. Check your orzo directions for cooking times, but you’ll probably want to cook it for around 8 minutes.

Be sure not to overcook the orzo or it will get really mushy. Mushy pasta is no good.

The Salad Ingredients

Besides the orzo, just a few simple vegetables and some feta cheese is all it really takes to make a great salad here.

Basic veggies.

I’ve given onion cutting lessons a few times on Macheesmo, but to review: The best way to cut an onion is to slice it in half down the root. Then lay it flat on a cutting board and cut off the stem end.

Remove the skin and slice the onion horizontally and vertically to form a grid.

Then you can easily turn the onion and dice it up.

Get it?

Spend some time with the veggies in this recipe to make sure they are all chopped up evenly.

For the cucumber, be sure to scoop out the seeds and peel it.

Take your time with these.

Once your pasta is cooked and drained, toss it in with the veggies and stir everything together.

This is a good start, but it would taste a bit bland if you left it like this.

All mixed up.

The Dressing

I recommend using a very light lemon and oil dressing for this salad. To start it, use the garlic technique from my ranch dressing recipe. Dice up the garlic finely and then mash it with the salt to form a rough paste.

A quick dressing.

Then just whisk in your lemon juice and olive oil and season it well with salt. You might not need all of the dressing for your salad. I recommend starting with half of the dressing and taste it. You can always add more, but it’s pretty hard to get dressing out of a pasta salad once it’s in there.

So go slow on it.

Some Good Add-ins

Besides the veggies, pasta, and dressing, I recommend tossing in some extra add-ins just to give the salad a bit more flavor.

First, feta cheese is a logical choice. It goes well with all the flavors and will give the salad some saltiness and creaminess.

Second, avocado. Who doesn’t love avocado?

Third, slivered almonds. They give the salad an awesome crunchy texture.

The almond toss.

Stir this all together and serve it in a big old bowl.

Such a good salad.

You can serve this bad boy at room temperature or chill it.

It’s perfect as a side for a dinner party or you can make it and eat it for lunch during the week.

If you wanted to make a meal of it, you could grill some chicken or tofu and serve it on top of the salad. I think it’s a pretty filling salad as is though.

Give those orzo makers some business and give this a shot!

Good stuff.

After a long holiday week of binge eating turkey and cookies, Betsy and I got off the plane and the first thing she said was, “Can we just eat salad for a week?”

I was happy to oblige for at least one dinner. My body was sort of screaming at me to pack in some veggies.

A lot of times I hear people say that they can’t make a meal out of salad and my response normally is, “You’re not making the right kind of salad!”

For me, a salad can definitely be a meal if it has a lot of different vegetables, textures, and flavors. One key element of the salad, for me, is always a delicious dressing.

While ranch dressing can be heavy, a little goes a long way and the subtle spice and herb flavors of this version can really round out a salad and make it a full meal.

Jalapeno Ranch Dressing

Yield: Makes about 3 cups.

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Total Time: 15 minutes

Ingredients:

1 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup Greek yogurt
1/2 cup buttermilk (if you want a dip, use 1/4 cup)
1 clove garlic
1/4 cup fresh parsley
1/4 cup fresh chives
1 tablespoon fresh dill
1 jalapeno, minced
2 tablespoons lime juice
Pinch of salt and pepper

Directions:

1) Dice garlic clove and add it to a bowl with a pinch of salt. Using a fork, mash the garlic and salt together to form a garlic paste.

2) Mince all the fresh herbs and add them the garlic paste. Mash them all together a bit and combine them well.

3) Mince jalapeno finely and add to the bowl. If you want the dressing to be really spicy, leave in seeds and pith of the pepper.

4) Add mayonnaise and greek yogurt to the bowl and stir well. Add in lime juice as well.

5) Thin the dressing out with buttermilk until it's the desired consistency. For a dip I would use 1/4 cup, for a dressing, use 1/2 cup.

6) Stir or shake dressing together well and use immediately or store for a week or two in the fridge.

Dressing Ingredients

Ranch dressing normally has sour cream in it, but I subbed Greek yogurt to make it somewhat healthier. Of course, it still has mayonnaise and buttermilk.

You can’t win them all.

The good news is that because of all the delicious herbs and stuff, just a few tablespoons of this dressing will add a lot of flavor to any salad. You don’t need to drown your salad to add a lot of flavor to it.

Lots of good fresh herbs.

Mincing and Mashing

When I’m making a dressing or sauce with garlic in it, I like to mince my clove of garlic and then add it to a bowl with a pinch of kosher salt. Then I grab a fork and just kind of mash the garlic and salt together.

This releases a lot of the juices in the garlic and makes a salty garlic paste. It’s why you definitely only need one clove of garlic for this recipe. Two would be over-powering.

One clove is all ya need.

Besides the garlic, take the time to really mince up the ingredients finely. It’s a dressing after all and you don’t want any huge pieces of any one thing.

For the jalapeno, I decided to take out the seeds and just mince the pepper. I think if I made this again, I would actually leave the seeds and pith of the pepper in to make it even a bit more spicy.

It’s just personal preference though. If you want it spicier, leave in the seeds and pith. If you want it more mild, take them out!

You could leave the seeds in if you wanted it real spicy.

All the herbs should be diced pretty finely. While you could leave out the dill in this recipe, I think the parsley and chives are pretty mandatory.

Gotta have chives in ranch.

Once all your herbs are chopped, add them to the bowl with the garlic paste. Squeeze in some fresh lime juice and mash everything together a bit to combine the flavors.

Good green stuff.

A Dip or a Dressing?

After your herbs are chopped and mixed, stir in the mayo and greek yogurt.

Then comes the decision part. Do you want a dip or a dressing? If you want a dip, add in just a tiny bit of buttermilk to give it some tang but leave it thick. If you’re shooting for a dressing, thin it out more with the buttermilk.

I used about 1/2 cup of buttermilk for my dressing version. At the end of the day though, you could thin it out more or less. Again, it’s personal preference on this.

Buttermilk is very important.

The Salad

When I’m making a salad as a meal, I like to pile on lots of interesting flavors and textures. Sometimes this can mean a protein like grilled chicken, but it doesn’t have to. In this case, I didn’t add any meat.

I did add some homemade croutons though that I tossed with some olive oil and garlic.

I also roasted some small beets which are the last thing I harvested from my summer garden! These were really sweet and delicious in the salad.

Yum.

Besides those things, my salad was basically a large chunk of the produce section.

Green lettuce, shredded carrots, cucumbers, red peppers, scallions, radishes, avocado, cheddar cheese…

A salad can be a meal.

As you can see, I just added a few drizzles of dressing and it was more than enough to flavor the salad.

This was a delicious meal and left me FULL.

The dressing will obviously not last as long as store-bought ranch dressing because it doesn’t have any preservatives or anything in it. The tradeoff is that it has a lot more flavor, so you need to use less of it.

I think it will easily last 2 weeks in the fridge though.

Give this dressing a shot if you’re in a salad rut!

Doesn't get fresher than this!

This is what I refer to as a Flavor Bible salad which is something that happens frequently at the Macheesmo household. Usually, it means that I have one ingredient that I want to throw in a salad… say… peaches. I flip open my Flavor Bible to the peach section and pick four or five other things that go with it.

Toss them in a bowl with some dressing and it’s almost guaranteed to be delicious.

To kick this salad up a notch, I also passed on the store bought dressings and shook up some homemade lemon-tarragon dressing.

Summer Peach Salad

Yield: Serves 4 as an app.

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Total Time: 15 minutes

Ingredients:

1 large peach, pitted and diced
1/4 red onion, sliced thinly
1/2 cucumber, seeded and sliced thin
4 ounces feta cheese, crumbled
Arugula or a mix of greens
Handful of fresh basil

Lemon-Tarragon Dressing:
1/3 Cup oil (I like a mix of light olive oil and canola oil)
1 lemon, juice only
1/4 Cup tarragon vinegar
1 small shallot, diced
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 Teaspoon kosher salt
1 Teaspoon fresh cracked pepper

Directions:

1) Take your time dicing up the veggies. Slice the red onions thinly, Seed the cucumber and slice it thin. Pit the peach and roughly chop it.

2) Add greens to a large bowl and add crumbled feta. Then top with veggies and peaches. Dice basil and add to top of salad.

3) Whisk or shake dressing ingredients together.

4) Let people dress their own salad.

The Veggies

The veggies for this salad are nothing exotic, but all the flavors work really well together. So just go with it.

Salad Basics.

The hardest thing to dice up is actually the peach. I’ve seen people absolutely mutilate peaches when trying to get the pit out. Assuming you are working with a ripe peach, it’s a fairly straightforward operation though.

Start by finding the small crease in the top of the peach next to where the peach was connected to the tree. This crease shows you the direction that the pit is facing. If you don’t cut along the crease you’ll have a hard time getting the pit out.

Just follow the crease and run your knife all around the peach.

There's a science to the peach.

Then just as if you were cutting an avocado, lightly twist the two peach halves and they should easily pop apart. Once half will be ready to dice up and one half will have the pesky pit in it still.

Perfect!

You could use your knife to pry the pit out of the peach half, but honestly, I find it easiest just to grab the edge of it where it meets the peach skin and lightly pry it out of the peach. If your peach is ripe, it should pop right out!

Then you can just dice up the peaches. For this recipe, I recommend leaving the skin on so don’t worry about peeling them.

For the onions and cucumbers, just slice them up pretty thinly.

Big pieces are good.

Add all the veggies and peaches to a large bowl with the crumbled feta and greens.

This is a very colorful and pretty salad.

Almost done...

As a final touch, chop up some fresh basil and sprinkle it on top of the salad. Don’t skimp on the basil either. It’s an awesome flavor when paired with the peaches.

Don't skimp on the basil!

The Dressing

I originally just wanted to make a lemon dressing for this salad, but it wasn’t quite flavorful enough for my liking so I added some tarragon vinegar to kick it up a notch.

Store bought dressing sucks.

If you’re a longtime Macheesmo reader, you might remember that tarragon vinegar is my secret ingredient in my house salad dressing!

This stuff is really flavorful and perfect for salad dressings.

Secret salad dressing ingredient!

When serving this salad up just make sure to get a bit of everything in each bowl and I recommend letting people dress their own salads.

Delicious.

For a salad with only a few ingredients, it has a lot of flavor and you can really taste summer in it. The peaches are obviously the star, but they have a pretty awesome supporting cast also.

Be sure to check back tomorrow for a main course for peach week. There will be pork involved. And bourbon.

A lot going on in there...

I’ve been on sort of a never-ending quest to find the perfect lunch salad. It’s tricky business because you want something that had plenty of filling ingredients so you can make it through the afternoon. Ideally, it would also keep really well so you can take it for an entire week.

Oh. It also needs to taste really, really good so you don’t get bored with it.

You can see a lot of my previous lunch salad attempts in the Macheesmo salads category. I try a bunch out that I don’t always post as well. I try to only post the really outstanding ones.

Which would easily include this one.

In fact, this one might have been my favorite to-date. The funny part is that it was inspired largely on a pre-made salad that Betsy grabbed at a local grocery store one day when I completely failed at making a lunch salad. It was so good that she asked me to try to re-do it. I added a bunch more veggies and stuff to it, but the idea is basically the same.

Asian Quinoa Salad

Yield: Serves 4-6.

Prep Time: 30 minutes

Total Time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups uncooked quinoa, cooked according to package
1 red pepper, diced
1/2 cucumber, seeded and diced
1/2 cup shredded carrots
2 scallions, minced
4-5 radishes, sliced thin
1/3 Cup soy sauce (dressing)
1 Tablespoon mirin rice wine vinegar (dressing)
1 Teaspoon spicy sesame oil (optional for dressing)
Chopped peanuts
Chopped fresh basil
Toasted sesame seeds

Directions:

1) Cook quinoa according to package.

2) Chop veggies finely and stir in with cooked quinoa.

3) Drizzle in dressing a bit at a time. Taste and adjust with more dressing if necessary. You might not need all of it.

4) Toast sesame seeds in a dry pan for a few minutes on medium heat until the seeds are lightly browned and fragrant.

5) Stir in peanuts, seeds, and basil.

Making the Quinoa

Quinoa sounds all fancy (and can sometimes come with a fancy price tag), but it’s surprisingly easy to make. You should read the instructions on the package since there are a few different varieties of quinoa. In general though, rinse the quinoa with cold water and then get some water simmering in a large pot. Usually you want a 2-to-1 ratio, water-to-quinoa.

Once the water is simmering pour in the rinsed quinoa, cover it, and let it simmer for about 20 minutes. Then kill the heat and let it sit for 10 minutes. Then lightly fluff it up and you’ll have a really delicious quinoa!

quin-wow.

Prepping Other Ingredients

The list of veggies you could toss in this salad is pretty endless. I’d recommending using whatever you have in your fridge that might go well in it. For me this included some cucumber, red pepper, onions, and shredded carrots. I also picked up some really beautiful radishes at the market on this given week and I figured they would give the salad a nice crunch also.

One thing I wouldn’t add to this salad is any kind of cheese like feta. Sometimes I like adding cheeses to salads like this, but in this case I think it would be too much.

Colorful stuff!

As far as prepping the veggies go, just try to get them sliced up pretty finely. You don’t want any huge chunks of any one thing. For the cucumber, I would remove the seeds, but you can leave on the skin if you want.

These were my radishes after a quick dice.

Go pretty thin on everything.

Once everything is in the bowl with the quinoa it’s a really pretty mix.

Hard to get healthier than this!

The Dressing

I kept the dressing pretty simple for this salad. You could fancy it up a bit with some fresh ginger and/or garlic, but I this was a quick and easy dressing that definitely go the job done.

You can definitely leave out the sesame chili oil or sub it with normal sesame oil, but I do think it’s a really nice touch.

Peanut are optional... only if you're allergic.

Just mix up the soy sauce, mirin and sesame oil and drizzle it over the salad. Depending on your tastes you might not need all the dressing so I would add about half of it and then adjust the flavor.

It’s pretty hard to remove soy sauce from a salad like this so start slow.

Add a bit at a time.

Once you add some dressing, stir it all together and then taste it. Just adjust it to your tastes at that point!

The Bonus Items

There’s a few bonus items that I think kick this salad up a notch. I added a few handfuls of chopped peanuts, a big handful of fresh basil which I just diced up and a few Tablespoons of sesame seeds.

Sesame seeds can be a tiny bit bland straight out of the box, but if you toast them for a few minutes in a dry pan, they become lightly browned and really fragrant.

So I recommend toasting them.

Love the smell of these guys.

You could add the garnishes to the top if you want, but I just stirred everything together.

This is supposed to be a low maintenance dish after all.

Lunch every day!

Honestly, this is about as healthy as a salad can get in my opinion. It’s got tons of veggies and flavor to get you going. If you wanted to add even more protein to it you could add some chicken or tofu, but I didn’t even think it needed it.

It’s a great change from the standard deli bar salad or whatever.

It’s funny, when I moved to Sofia, Bulgaria three years ago, I didn’t like cucumbers. I avoided them on veggie platters and ate around them in salads. However, pretty quickly I realized that cucumbers weren’t worth worrying about especially when you move to a country where you can’t speak the language, you don’t know the Cyrillic alphabet and you don’t know anyone in the city.

I also figured that we move abroad to try new things, to test ourselves, to have an adventure and to learn to love new things. Cucumbers or краставица (krastavitsa) were an easy stepping stone into Bulgarian culture.

Now here I am sharing two different Bulgarian dishes that revolve around cucumbers.

Shopska Salad and Tarator Soup

Yield: Serves 4.

Prep Time: 30 minutes (for both)

Total Time: 30 minutes (for both) + chill time for soup

Ingredients:

Shopska Salad:
3-4 tomatoes
1 medium large English/European cucumber (if you can't find this you can use any cucumber you can get your hands on. If the seeds are too big or bitter tasting remove them)
1 medium to large onion
1/8 of a pound feta cheese (Greek feta is a substitution the Bulgarian cheese сирене--sirene. I've seen Bulgarian feta at shops like Whole Foods before and it's worth looking. Bulgarian feta or white cheese as Bulgarians translate this cheese for foreigners is softer and less salty than Greek feta.)
Salt and pepper to taste
Oil and vinegar dressing (traditionally Bulgarians use sunflower seed oil and grape vinegar but olive oil and red wine vinegar is what I used)

Tarator Soup:
1 cup plain yogurt
1 1/2 cups water
1 cup finely diced English/European cucumber (if you can't find this you can use any cucumber you can get your hands on and if you think the seeds are too big or bitter tasting remove them)
2-3 garlic cloves, minced
3-4 tablespoons chopped dill
1/8 to 1/4 cup of chopped walnuts
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Shopska Salad:
Chop the tomatoes and cucumber into bite size pieces. Eye-ball the amounts. Your goal is to have an equal amount of tomatoes and cucumbers. Chop the onion into pieces about half the size of the tomatoes and cucumber that is unless you want a big bite of onion in your salad but I assume you do not want this.

In a large bowl mix together the tomatoes, cucumbers and onions. In terms of portions you are aiming for a ration of about 1/3 onions to 2/3 of the tomato and cucumber mixture. Crumble feta cheese on top and mix. At this point you have a choice you can dress the salad with olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper or you can serve the salad and let people dress their own. This is what Bulgarians do. Anywhere I've ever been in Bulgaria you dress your own salad at the table be it a restaurant or a friend's house and then you eat this salad washing it down with a homemade grape brandy called rakiya.

Tarator Soup:
In a container with a lid mix together the yogurt, water, cucumber, garlic, dill and walnuts. Shake. Chill in the refrigerator for 2-4 hours.

Before serving, taste it and add salt and pepper accordingly. The thing that makes or breaks this soup is the size of the diced pieces of cucumber, garlic, dill and walnuts. You really want these as small as possible. I used a knife to slice and dice the cucumber, garlic, dill and walnuts because I like being in control but my mom asked me while I was shaking my soup together: Do Bulgarians really chop up everything by hand and then shake the soup? Me: I don't know. Mom: I bet you could have saved some time using the food processor.

The first dish is called Shopska salad and is the traditional Bulgarian salad. It’s a dish best made with fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and feta cheese. Depending on your taste you can also add diced bell peppers and black olives. Everything is diced and combined in a bowl. Traditionally you dress the salad at the table yourself with salt and pepper, sunflower seed oil and grape vinegar. It’s light summery and very easy to make. The dish relies on ingredients that are readily available in Bulgaria during the summer–it seems like everyone knows someone growing tomatoes and cucumbers.

This dish entered popular culture during communism in Bulgaria thanks to the state tourism agency–Balkantourist. Apparently the agency thought they needed a little more than the Black Sea, the Balkan mountain range and rose oil production to really “sell” the country. Enter shopska salad–named after a region just outside of the capitol Sofia. Today you can’t go to a Bulgarian restaurant and not see this salad on the menu.

I spent my whole first year eating shopska salad every where I went. My Bulgarian friends and colleagues insisted on it and I wasn’t in any position to say no. So I ate it and ate it. By December I was sick and tired of the salad and the produce was no longer as fresh as it had been in August when I’d first arrived. Luckily by then I’d found a Bulgarian pizza joint with a walnut, pear, blue cheese and romaine lettuce salad. Now I eat shopska salad between the months of May and October. In fact, the last salad I had before flying home this summer was a shopska.

Another cucumber dish I am in love with is tarator soup. It’s a cold yogurt soup with finely diced cucumbers, garlic and dill and topped off with some chopped walnuts. Again, it’s easy to put together but what’s great about this dish is that it tastes even better after a few hours in the refrigerator. On the Black Sea, men walk through the sun-bathers selling cups of tarator as a refreshing snack in a cup. So this dish screams summer to me–sand, sun, yogurt and cucumbers. In restaurants it’s dished out in bowls and eaten with a spoon and Bulgarians shake on plenty of salt and pepper. Twenty-somethings swear by this dish as a hangover cure.

In the summer both of these dishes are served up with grilled meat be it chicken or pork shish kabobs or minced meat hamburger-like patties called kufteta.

Shopska Salad

Chop the tomatoes and cucumber into bite size pieces. Eye-ball the amounts. Your goal is to have an equal amount of tomatoes and cucumbers. Chop the onion into pieces about half the size of the tomatoes and cucumber that is unless you want a big bite of onion in your salad but I assume you do not want this.

In a large bowl mix together the tomatoes, cucumbers and onions. In terms of portions you are aiming for a ration of about 1/3 onions to 2/3 of the tomato and cucumber mixture. Crumble feta cheese on top and mix. At this point you have a choice you can dress the salad with olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper or you can serve the salad and let people dress their own. This is what Bulgarians do. Anywhere I’ve ever been in Bulgaria you dress your own salad at the table be it a restaurant or a friend’s house and then you eat this salad washing it down with a homemade grape brandy called rakiya.

Tarator Soup

In a container with a lid mix together the yogurt, water, cucumber, garlic, dill and walnuts. Shake. Chill in the refrigerator for 2-4 hours.

Before serving, taste it and add salt and pepper accordingly. The thing that makes or breaks this soup is the size of the diced pieces of cucumber, garlic, dill and walnuts. You really want these as small as possible. I used a knife to slice and dice the cucumber, garlic, dill and walnuts because I like being in control but my mom asked me while I was shaking my soup together: Do Bulgarians really chop up everything by hand and then shake the soup? Me: I don’t know. Mom: I bet you could have saved some time using the food processor.

And you know what? She’s probably right. Moms are like that.

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Change up the standard.

This upcoming weekend is probably the biggest grilling weekend of the year here in the US. It’s our independence day on Monday and that means that we Americans will be celebrating by eating lots of meat, blowing stuff up, and drinking a lot of beer.

Pretty standard really.

One of the basic sides at pretty much every BBQ party this weekend will be coleslaw. It’s cold. It tastes great with burgers and steaks. And frankly, it’s probably the healthiest thing some people will eat this weekend.

If you’ve never made coleslaw, it’s basically just raw cabbage which doesn’t seem very appetizing, but if you add a few other veggies and a thick mayo sauce, it ends up being pretty good.

I figured I’d try the same thing with kale which I actually prefer to cabbage. Raw kale can have a slightly bitter taste to it, but it’s not a problem in this slaw.

Kale Slaw

Yield: Serves 6.

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Total Time: 15 minutes

Ingredients:

1 bunch Tuscan kale, the curly kind, minced thinly
1 daikon radish, minced or or shredded
1 red pepper, minced
1/2 lemon, juice only
2/3 - 1 cup mayonnaise, homemade is best
A few dashes of hot sauce
Salt and pepper

Directions:

1) Remove ribs from kale leaves and mince finely into strips. Also shred daikon and mince red onion.

2) In a separate bowl, mix mayo, hot sauce, and lemon juice.

3) Pour dressing over slaw and stir well to combine.

4) Season with salt and pepper.

5) Serve right away or make in advance.

The Kale

If you take a big bite of raw kale, you probably won’t be too happy. It usually has a kind of bitter, iron-like taste. If you steam it or saute it with some lemon, this completely goes away, but the raw stuff is a bit dangerous.

This isn’t a hard problem to solve though in a slaw. Step one is just to make sure you take the time to prep your kale correctly. Cut out the bit middle ribs (stems) and then mince it very finely into narrow strips.

Ditch the stems for this.

Speaking of veggies, make sure to take time prepping the other two veggies in this slaw also.

If you’ve never used a daikon radish before, they basically look like albino carrots. They have a mild radish flavor though and work great in slaws like this.

If you can’t find a daikon, you can use a few regular radishes. Just make sure to dice them finely.

Not cheese.

The Sauce

Over the last month or so I’ve been ranting pretty regularly about how I’ll never use store bought mayo again.

Well, it didn’t take me very long to break my own rule.

I wanted to make homemade mayo for this stuff, but I was out of eggs and the idea of going to the store just for mayo was a bit soul-crushing. So, back to the store bought stuff for this post.

It worked fine for a slaw like this, but I think it would’ve made a noticeable difference if I would’ve made it myself.

Homemade mayo is best as always.

I just stirred my mayo with some lemon juice (1/2 lemon) and a few dashes of hot sauce.

The hot sauce works really well with the kale flavor.

Then just pour your dressing in with your veggies!

The sauce.

Stir this all together and taste it for salt and pepper. It’ll probably need a good pinch of both.

Don't forget the salt and pepper!

You could serve this stuff with almost anything off the grill.

It’s a fantastic and interesting side that’s a great change from the standard stuff.

I served mine with my sriracha beer can chicken and some grilled potatoes. Very solid meal.

Great with BBQ stuff!

If you’re sick of the old standard coleslaw and have ten or fifteen minutes, I think you’ll love the crisp flavors in this version.

Give it a shot this weekend!

The rooster!

You want to know how much I love Sriracha chili sauce?

I love it so much that I bought matching linens.

Ok. That’s kind of a lie. Actually it’s a complete lie. I have no idea where we even got these linens from, but I swear it’s the same rooster. The sriracha people must have not been paying him enough so he had to start modeling for linens on the side. BOOM!

I will occasionally go through a phase where I’ll put this stuff on pretty much anything. Soups, salad, meats, whatever. It’s just delicious.

I wanted to make a big macaroni salad to snack on for a few days and figured why not toss in some of the rooster sauce and give it some kick?

Turned out really delicious!

Rooster Macaroni Salad

Yield: Serves 4.

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Total Time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:

12 ounces macaroni, cooked al dente
1/2 small red onion, minced
1/2 red pepper, minced
1 Anaheim (or poblano) pepper, minced
3 stalks celery, minced
2/3 Cup mayonnaise, homemade mayo is best
2-4 Tablespoons sriracha sauce
Salt and pepper
Olive oil

Directions:

1) Cook macaroni al dente. Drain and drizzle with a bit of olive oil. Stir to make sure it isn't sticking.

2) Dice veggies to an equal size.

3) Add veggies to macaroni along with mayo and chili sauce.

4) Start with a small amount of mayo and sauce and work up to the desired amount. Taste frequently.

5) Season with salt and pepper.

6) Keeps in the fridge for 4 or 5 days without a problem.

Macaroni and Mayonnaise

When I was shopping for the ingredients for this dish I noticed that my local grocer carries pre-made macaroni salad in the deli section. What I loved about it is that you could barely even tell it was macaroni salad. Good thing it was labeled!

It was basically just pasta swimming in a sea of gloppy sauce with a few small chunks of veggies. It was more soup than salad.

If you’re going to make real macaroni salad, the two things that you need to get right are the macaroni and the mayo.

For starters, be careful not to overcook your macaroni. I find that mine cooks faster than the package says, so keep an eye on it. It shouldn’t be soggy at all. Al dente is the technical term.

When it’s done, drain it and drizzle it with a tiny amount of oil so the pasta doesn’t stick together.

Not hard.

When it comes to the mayo, I really encourage you to try to make your own if you can. Homemade mayo is leaps and bounds above any store bought version I’ve tried.

If you simply refuse to try that though, go light on it to start. The mayo should be a light coat on the macaroni. The macaroni should, at no point, be floating.

What’s nice about homemade mayo is that it’s so flavorful that you can get away with using a lot less of it.

The good stuff.

The Veggies

I like to pack in a lot of veggies in my pasta salad. Good fresh crunchy ones are the way to go. You can use almost any veggie that you like really. I went with four of my favorites.

You could get crazy here.

The key to veggies in a salad like this is to try to get them all basically uniform. Take your time dicing (it’s good practice). The last thing you want is to get a big chunk of red onion or something.

They should all be roughly the same size regardless of what veggies you are using.

Good knife practice!

Oh. And don’t forget the Sriracha!

I’m so addicted to this stuff. I can blow through a bottle in a week or two if I’m really in a sriracha mood.

Hittin' the sauce.

Basically just stir all this stuff together!

I like to add the mayo last and add it about 1/4 Cup at a time. You don’t want too much and it’s hard (read impossible) to remove mayo from a macaroni salad.

When it comes to the chili sauce, start light. I’d recommend about two tablespoons. Then stir it and taste it. I used about four in my version, but like I said, I have a problem.

Also, keep in mind that the salad will get spicier if you let it sit overnight.

Taste as you go...

This is perfect for a picnic or for lunch.

Pile it high and deep!

Spicy!

I’m generally not a huge macaroni salad fan, but I could almost eat my weight in this stuff.

Watch out for that rooster though. He’s a spicy one!

Fresh and delicious!

I’m rapidly becoming a huge fan of tempeh. I think I might like it better than tofu when it comes to soy products. It has a lot more texture and is honestly a lot easier to cook.

When meat eaters ask me what vegetarian options taste most like meat, the answer is tempeh. It’s just very hearty and flavorful.

Plus you can grill it!

This salad took me just a few minutes to toss together and it fed me and Betsy for a few days. It’s very healthy and perfect for the summer!

Grilled Tempeh Salad

Yield: Serves 6.

Ingredients:

1 block of tempeh, 12-16 ounces is good
3 ears fresh sweet corn
1 can black beans (15 ounces)
1 jalapeno, seeded and minced (optional)
1/4 Cup basil, minced
Olive oil
Salt and Pepper

Yogurt Sauce:
1 Cup yogurt
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 lemon, juice only
1-2 Teaspoons hot sauce
1 Tablespoon fresh dill, minced

Directions:

1) For sauce, mince garlic and dill and stir with other ingredients. Let chill until needed.

2) Rub corn and tempeh with a bit of olive oil and season with salt and pepper.

3) Grill corn over medium-high heat for about 12 minutes until there are light grill marks on each side.

4) Grill tempeh over medium-high heat for about 8 minutes until it has a crispy exterior.

5) Cut corn off the cob and cube tempeh. Mix with rinsed black beans and minced basil. Stir in a bit of olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Serve warm or cold!

The Sauce

I’m not even sure that you entirely need a sauce for this salad. It’s pretty good without it, but I decided to whip one up just to try it and I really liked it with the sauce.

So you can take it or leave it.

If you take it though, you’ll need these things.

Impromptu sauce.

See that dill? From my garden. No big deal. I just grew it from THE EARTH.

Anyway, dice up the garlic and dill really finely and stir everything together. Add as much hot sauce as you want really, but start with a tiny amount.

Mine kind of took on a light pink hue.

Pretty tasty!

Grilling Things

It’s not really necessary to grill the things in this recipe, but I like the slightly charred flavor. If you don’t have access to a grill, you could roast the corn for a few minutes and sear the tempeh in a hot pan.

Same results.

This time of year, use fresh corn if you can find it!

Gotta love summer.

Rub the corn and tempeh with a light coat of olive oil and season them with salt and pepper.

I used a garden veggie tempeh, but use whatever flavor you want!

Weird looking, but good!

Heat your grill up to medium-high and toss on your corn and tempeh. I’d recommend starting the corn about 5 minutes before the tempeh.

The tempeh will need maybe 4 minutes per side. It’s already cooked so you really just want to crisp up the outside a bit and give it some nice char.

Turn the corn every few minutes and you should be getting a few light grill marks on them.

My grill almost revolted RE: tempeh.

When everything is done on the grill, cut the kernels off the cob and mix it with some black beans. I used canned beans that I drained and rinsed really well.

Cube up the tempeh and mince a jalapeno and some basil. The jalapeno is optional, but I like the heat.

Then just stir everything together and drizzle in a tiny amount of olive oil. Season with salt and pepper and you’re all set!

Tasty!

This is great as-is, but like I said, I think it’s fun to serve a bowl of the sauce on the side.

Really good!

This was one of those meals that’s not only filling and tasty, but leaves you feeling very healthy when you finish it.

It works great as a side, as a main dish, or as a lunch.

I’m telling you, as a pretty solid carnivore, I can’t get enough tempeh these days.