A crunchy salad with great acidity and punch, a good match for heavy, meat-filled autumn stews. Use different coloured beetroot for an even more beautiful result.
Recipe and photo from Mia Kristensen of CPH Good Food.
This recipe is just a guide – use whichever vegetables you have to hand and dressing quantities that suit your taste. This is a great way to use up those winter veg that might otherwise hang around in the fridge too long, and keeps well in the fridge for a couple of days. Eating them raw makes a refreshing change, too. The rainbow colours are pretty, and the salad looks stunning served in a bowl lined with the beautiful outer leaves of a large January King cabbage, which are sea green fringed with purple.
Waldorf salad was invented at the very end of the 19th century in New York’s Waldorf Hotel. Originally it was just celery and apple, dressed well. Over time other ingredients have been added – walnuts (or pecans), grapes, blue cheese, leaves such as watercress and sometimes chicken breast. To be quick, you could use shop-bought mayonnaise, or plain yoghurt flavoured with mustard and lemon juice.
This is a lovely way to use butternut or other sweet orange autumn squashes. You could omit the red peppers if you like, and use soft, tangy goat’s cheese instead of the Feta. To spice it up further, roast the squash with a sprinkling of ground cumin, coriander and nutmeg.
This recipe is adapted from ‘Everyday & Sunday recipes from Riverford Farm’ by Jane Baxter and Guy Watson, which is a great cookbook (not least because it contains five of my recipes!). It is the perfect salad for late spring and early summer, when spinach and broad beans are in season.
The pomegranate molasses really makes the dish. Look for it in Middle Eastern and Turkish food shops. It should be just reduced pure pomegranate juice with nothing added – intensely sweet and sour at the same time, a bit like aged balsamic vinegar.
This bright salad is perfect on a steaming hot day, to kick off or punctuate an otherwise heavy meal, or to accompany roast or grilled meat. The dressing needs no vinegar due to the acidity of the oranges and onions, but do make sure you use excellent olive oil.
You could omit the onion, olives and mint if you wish, and/or add in some sliced celery or shaved fennel. And you could garnish with fennel fronds if you have them, or even toast and grind some fennel seeds to sprinkle over. Fennel and orange are perfect partners, and fennel is typical of Sicily, where it grows wild along country roadsides.
In Sicily you will even find this salad made with lemons instead of oranges. And blood oranges make a particularly stunning platter.
Cacık (pronounced ‘jajuk’) is the Turkish equivalent of Greek tzatziki – a garlicky yoghurt and cucumber dip/soup/salad, depending on what it’s served with. It’s a fantastic accompaniment to kebabs, meatballs and cooked vegetable dishes, and there is some evidence that eating yoghurt with meat is good for us. It’s usually made with pounded garlic cloves, but bright green wild garlic makes a very pretty alternative.
‘Kemia’ – various salads, often made with cooked vegetables – are served at the start of a Moroccan meal, a bit like tapas in Spain or meze in Turkey. They are always beautifully presented, to stimulate the appetite, and subtly spiced with classic Moroccan flavours such as mint, parsley, pepper, cumin, cinnamon and citrus. The beauty for the cook is that you can prepare them all in advance and serve them at room temperature.
Of course, if you prefer you can roast the beetroots rather than boil them: Place them, whole and unpeeled, in a roasting tin with a splash of olive oil and water. Sprinkle with salt, cover tightly with foil and roast in a hot oven until tender throughout. I feel this method works better with summer beetroot, and those at the start of the winter season. These days boiling seems preferable.
This would probably never happen in Morocco, but I like to serve this salad over a bed of full-fat plain yoghurt. The flavours go so well together, and the beetroot juices bleed into the yoghurt creating bright pink streaks and swirls.
‘Kemia’ – various salads, often made with cooked vegetables – are served at the start of a Moroccan meal, a bit like tapas in Spain or meze in Turkey. They are always beautifully presented, to stimulate the appetite, and subtly spiced with classic Moroccan flavours such as mint, parsley, pepper, cumin, cinnamon and citrus. The beauty for the cook is that you can prepare them all in advance and serve them at room temperature.
In Morocco I noticed that cooks almost always scraped the cores out of the carrots once they were boiled. It’s true that the core may be tougher and less tasty, but normally I don’t bother. You might think the icing sugar is weird, but this is commonly used in Moroccan salads and the touch of sweetness works really well. But you can of course leave it out if you wish.
While staying with Erhan Şeker on Turkey’s Aegean coast, we watched in awe as he whipped up dish after dish in front of us in no time at all. Erhan likes to use plenty of herbs (his aim is to grow all 250 herbs in his ‘Herbs and Spices of the World’ book, and he’s making good progress), and he likes his food to be simple, fast and fresh. He also loves inventing new dishes and trying them out on passing culinary anthropologists.
To demonstrate these principles he went out and picked a bunch of fresh oregano, sliced up a couple of small courgettes and had this delicious salad on our plates in what seemed like seconds. Cooking from scratch does not need to be labour intensive. I think it would also work well with other herbs, such as basil, parsley or dill. To keep the flavours simple, I’d just use one herb though, two at the most.