Saturday, January 10, 2009

Leftover Chronicles: epic salads



Yo. In desperation to procrastinate grant-writing, I bring you special reports from my backlog of recipes for holiday leftovers. Too late for your Festivus ham? Well it's in time for Easter.

Pictured here is one of the raddest salads. First, let's talk about salad. Salad is a medium. Like it's brethren the Sandwich, or the Pizza, the Salad is a format for food. Too many people limit their salads to veggies, and douse the veggies in unhappy glue-soup dressings. Here at Feast we're as enthusiastic about minimalism as we are devoted to deliciousness.

Here's how to make the above salad.
Put a handful of spinach into a dish. Now you are officially making a salad, so anything goes. Spoon some cold home-made cranberry sauce onto the margin.
On the counter, assemble: some pecans, a fuji apple, plantains, ham. From the fridge, get your masson jar of Duck Fat (we haven't covered how to get make this but I'll post it soon).

Put about a teaspoon of duck fat into a frying pan and kick the burner to medium. While the grease melts and spreads (mmmmmm), chop the fuji apple into cubes a bit bigger than dice. Once the grease is liquid-y and clear, turn the heat down to low. Toss all the apple cubes in the pan and shimmy the handle so that all the pieces get coated in a layer of duck grease. Now let them cook a little bit in the pan, flipping them around. It should take about a minute or two. The idea is to let the sugary outer margin mix with the grease and caramelize a little bit. You don't want to cook the apples all the way through. When they're done, put them in a little dish like the people on tv do.

Now the plantains. Slice them pretty thin and fry those puppies up (add oil - canola or something, it needed). While the plantains fry, slice your ham into medium pieces. Slap the ham into the pan when there is only a little tiny bit of duck grease left. You don't want to add grease to your ham but it will keep the ham from drying out as it warms up.

Now put all these things onto your salad at once.

The flavors of the duck, fuji, ham, and plantain are so rad together. But it's really important to have a hefty bed of spinach underneath. It's a great way to eat a bowl of greens with iron and all that. Most importantly, the crisp, mellow bitterness of the spinach balances out the decadent insane flavores dancing around it.

Notice we didn't do anything to the nuts. Candy would be overkill here. And the ham is plain also; no coatings or nonsense.

I made this with my mom, at my parent's place, with ham leftover from a class party (Graduate Sedimentology Seminar: Carbonate Depositional Environments). We also made basic cuban black beans. My mom, in an adorable effort to welcome my independent heathen spirit to her home, bought BEER (gasp) for me. She chose Corona (probably from seeing comercials for it, bless her heart), and with a crisp lime it went well with the beans. But if I planned this meal for guests (and it would be perfect as a romantic dinner for two), I would pair it with something richer and not too sweet. Negro Modelo maybe.

Other pairing options for this salad, matched to goals:
Stay in and play ping pong? Black Toad.
Party? Red Stripe
Decadent romance? Rogue Hazelnut Brown Nectar
Old friends, maybe some Scrabble? Firestone Double Barrel

Incidentally this is a coffee table that my dad carved for my mom when they were dating.

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