William Penn Life, 2005 (40. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
2005-08-01 / 8. szám
The Hungarian Kitchen with Főszakács Béla Simple summer salads FÁRADJON BE A MAGYAR KONYHÁBA. I had so much fun playing golf last month I lost track of writing this column. How can I forget all the faithful readers of the Hungarian Kitchen? I learned these past two weekends that a lot of golfers like to cook Hungarian. I salute them all! Let me give you an update on the cookbook project. I received more recipes after the cutoff date and have been working to fit them all in. Since more work was required to enter recipes, proofread, edit the pages with graphics and find a printer, I have now pushed the completion of this project to early November. The new cookbook will be available to purchase for the holiday season. Next month I'll have all the details and a few recipes from the new cookbook as a preview of what is to come. As the WPA cookbook has not been revised in a long time, I want to do the best I can to produce a classic. Thank you all for your patience as it will be worth your wait! On that positive note let's get into the kitchen and work on this month's topic.... Whether you call it rabbit food, a light meal or an appetizer, salads are a healthy part of a diet. Most think that a salad is just lettuce with a few tomatoes, maybe a cucumber, with dressing spilled on the top. That is a quick version which we all have enjoyed. Let's take a look at all the components you could use to make up a salad. The definition of a salad is a dish of raw leafy vegetables tossed with raw or other cooked vegetables served with a dressing. A second definition calls a salad a cold dish of chopped veggies, fruit, meat, fish or eggs prepared with a dressing like mayonnaise. If you read between the lines, we can conclude a salad is anything we eat served with some kind of dressing or mayonnaise. Now that would give us over 300 possible selections for making a salad. Let's look at some main ingredients that can make up a salad. GREENS make up the bulk of most salads we have. Notice I didn't say lettuce because lettuce is actually one type of green that can go into a salad. The darker the green, the more flavor it has to offer. ICEBURG lettuce is round, firm and watery but without much flavor. GREEN LEAF lettuce is mild tasting with long crumply edged leaves. SPINACH is the most popular green after lettuce and can be curly edged or flat leaf variety. It has a distinctive flavor raw and cooked. RADICCHIO is a red chicory variety, crisp and slightly bitter in taste. ROMAINE is an elongated, cylindrical head with thick veined leaves where most of the flavor is in the lighter colored portion not the dark as in other lettuce. MESCLUN in French means a mixture or combo of chicory, arugula and watercress. CHICORY, called frisee by the French, is crisp with a slightly bitter flavor. ARUGULA is a green herb, soft in texture, with a slight peppery taste. All of the above can be used alone in any combination with each other. Now let's see what we can add to our base of greens to further build our salad. How about some onions? Scallion's part of the onion family has a flavor somewhere between onion and garlic. RED ONIONS are red skinned with a pungent taste and odor. VIDALIA ONIONS come from Vidalia, Georgia, and have a juicy sweet taste to them. You can probably get other local varieties of sweet onions in your area of the country. What's next you ask? How about some colorful, flavorful tomatoes? GRAPE TOMATOES are baby Roma 6 William Penn Life, August 2005
