le sauce

weekend class: roasted beet and blood orange salad

weekend class = learning a thing or two about cooking and dining well. techniques, ingredients, recipes projects that definitely need to be tackled on the weekend. the result? weekend-class fare, of course.

There is a place for salads in winter. A particular kind of salad, and one that you are not likely to want or have in the summer. This type of salad in question is confident and outspoken.

It is sometimes late-Friday-night surly, all tangy and a touch bitter, and sometimes it is Sunday-dinner filling, with all kinds of carbs and proteins landing with a thud in your bowl. And when the salad involves roasting ingredients, you almost always restrict it's invitation to winter, don't you? This recipe I'm sharing is not my creation but one I was compelled to make this winter, and one I reserved for weekend cooking because while easy to make, there are several components. A couple of recipes within this recipe. The resulting salad is definitely as brazen as the winter salads I described. Powerful. Violent even--the dressing at least. 

Well look at it. That is violent pink if I ever saw it and wait until you taste it. It's not for the timid and in my opinion, it can't really share the table with anything other than a docile piece of bread. My appreciation of the sharp-as-a-scolding dressing was aqcuired over many bites. I teetered on not liking it, but the enthusiastic acceptance and praise by everyone else at the table (a diverse group, too) helped me see its finer points. It saved the salad from being that fine but all too common roasted beet and nut salad you still see on all too many menus. And though I'm not one of those people that thinks every star ingredient needs a foil, this vinaigrette which gets it's kick from raw shallots is a nice partner for those beets, if--and this is what I will do differently next time--you dress the salad as you go. The amount on the beets alone, and maybe a splash off a fork thrown from a distance, is all I'd need on my greens on a normal day. If you're feeling like you can go head to head with a stronger salad, get as surly as you want, I'll get right out of your way.

This salad is from that great cookbook that I was gifted recently, and the recipe is from that awesome restaurant in Brooklyn I raved about--the one where I had that killer other salad that spawned this recipe. I think it's worth checking making while you still feel like roasting vegetables. Oh--and do not waste that garlic that the recipe has you roast for the sole purpose of infusing the beets. Much less violent than anything above, you need to spread those cloves on hot, buttered baguette and sprinkle with sea salt and the roasted rosemary too for the garlic bread of your fantasies.

weekend class: rice paper dumplings with mung bean filling

weekend class = learning a thing or two about cooking and dining well. techniques, ingredients, recipes projects that definitely need to be tackled on the weekend. the result? weekend-class fare, of course.

Well, I should have know when my dough came together with no effort, when the specified mere 1 minute of kneading resulted in the texture I was after, when the rest time was just a quick 5 minutes, that the hard part was to come. Dough-making is never without its anxiety as far as I'm concerned (I may have taught myself the basics of baking last year but it's still doesn't come easily to me). It was the moment I stopped to take a picture of my ready-to-use dough that things went wrong. The dough was ready to use the moment I let air touch it, and a couple of minutes later it was dangerously, if not visibly, a touch too dry. Wetting my hands slightly helped bring it back from the point of no return, but I did let a small piece pass that point. I added more water to it or rather, too much and didn't feel confident about how much flour and starch to add to balance out my mistake, so that piece was a loss. The batch I made by weight was much more successful than when I measured the flours, so, as usual when it comes to flour, weigh if you can. But that's the only warning/advice I have for you. The good news is...

...it's generally really easy to make your own rice flour dough! That idea is ridiculously exciting to me because, first, look how beautiful your homemade dumplings can be, all plump and shiny, slightly translucent and exactly the texture of the best of its kind at dim sum. And then, think of the possibilities. I didn't know where I was headed at first with a slightly denser batch I'd made, but I steamed some unfilled rounds of it anyway and ended up with rice cakes, of course! I froze those for a future soup. I'm going to be brave enough next time to steam a sheet of the dough, making it just a touch wetter so it spreads without rolling, to cut into fresh rice noodles. Can you imagine? My accidents led me to the confidence to try that--it's quite amazing how a little too much air and a little extra water will change the elasticity of this super-glutenous dough drastically.