I have been bad, very, very bad… After a strong start, I have neglected Kitchen Crush and my readers. My only excuse is that a lot has happened in the past two weeks. There was a trip to Greece to visit the best of all husbands. Among other things, we went to Athens, walked through the city, climbed up to Acropolis and dined in a lovely Cretan restaurant called Alatsi (a review of the place and the food will follow shortly). After Greece, there was Poland, where I visited my family and I got infected with a vicious stomach flu, which not only put me off cooking and food for a good week and a half, but also resulted in a two kilogram weight loss. [While I generally wouldn’t recommend stomach bugs as a weight loss solution (I will spare you the gruesome details), I think that we’re even, that virus and I]. After a week at home, where my hopes to cook and photograph some delicious Polish foods with my mom have been dashed, I went to Warsaw, to visit my very, extremely, super-pregnant friend Gośka (hang in there, only four days to go). And then, I came back to Düsseldorf and started my new… tam-tam-tam-tam: job. That’s right, a couple of weeks ago a job offer was made and I accepted. Thus, I am no longer a lady of leisure or as my husband claims ‘bum extraordinaire’, I am now a member of the working class. I do not know what this will mean for Kitchen Crush… undoubtedly less time to cook and missed rendezvous with the perfect photographing light during the week. But on the bright side, I will have a whole week to come up with the most delicious and beautiful foods to cook on the weekends. This Easter weekend has already given me a head start. I have a bunch of beautiful recipes waiting to be posted. So without further ado, here’s the very elegant and delicious Red Wine Fig and Gorgonzola Cream salad.
Category Archives: salads
Greek Salad
I am writing this post from Greece, where I have been since Friday, visiting my better half. I have only been to Greece once before, in September of last year, when I came here to take part in the wedding of my Greek friends. I have to say that I fell in love with this country and its people at first sight. Sometimes you come to a place and instantly feel like you belong there, or at the very least, you feel good there and you know that this is your kind of place. Greece is one such place for me. My first trip here was quite magical. It was September, the weather was perfect, the islands were beautiful and the omnipresent vines of bougainvillea put me in the most poetic of moods. But most of all, I was charmed by the Greek people. They are very real, they love to eat and drink and dance, but above all, they love to talk, to laugh and to philosophize. And then, of course, they are obsessed with feeding you, in fact, they will attempt to feed you, till you burst. But it’s all good, you see, because the food is very good. One of my favorite Greek dishes (and the one which has made it around the world) is the Greek salad. It’s very simple yet very tasty. My Greek friend, Connie, tells me that the secret to a good Greek salad is to use very high quality, fresh, juicy and tasty vegetables… Well, that may be just the secret to making anything taste good… That may be just the secret to leading a meaningful life. In any case, here’s my tasty, Greek salad, with authentic Cretan olive oil and some Greek oregano.
Tomato and Mozzarella Salad
Tomato and Mozzarella Salad, also known to the initiated as Insalata Caprese, and to the even more initiated as the Tricolore (its three colors: red, white and green are the exact colors of the Italian flag), is one of the simplest and most delicious salads I know. In fact, this was my appetizer of choice in restaurants, before I became interested in food and determined to try out all sorts of different dishes. Trying out new dishes is definitely interesting, especially when I consider my proclivity for choosing the weird and the experimental. Fortunately, I manage to pawn off the food I don’t like on Tim, who, by the way, picks the best thing on the menu 99% of the time. He, consistently, outpicks me, even when I don’t follow the particularly adventurous route, and I, consistently, make him eat my food while stealing his. What can I say… he knows how to pick his food and I knew how to pick my man. Once in a while, I will still order Insalata Caprese, which while not adventurous or weird, is unusual in its simplicity and flavor.
Spinach, Bacon and Egg Salad
The first sentence of Chuck Klosterman’s great novel Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs reads: No woman will ever satisfy me. That pretty much sums up my feelings toward salads. You see, I do not come from a salad-eating culture… we, Poles, have always been the potato, vodka and kielbasa people, not green salad people. And although I’ve lived in America for a while, where salads are considered meals in themselves, eating a salad has always felt weird to me. It’s not only that it made me feel like I’m a cow, chewing on a handful of grass, with pieces invariably sticking in all possible directions, refusing to fit in my mouth all at once, falling down and sprinkling me with dressing… no, that’s not the only thing. What made me most uncomfortable about eating salads is that I always felt like a fraud. I would order a salad because I’d be in a healthy mood but what I secretly wanted to eat was bacon. Halfway through my salad, I didn’t feel like finishing it or being healthy anymore, I only felt like stabbing myself in the eye. I finally came to peace with salad eating when I discovered that I do like salads when they incorporate some of my favorite foods and if they have a tasty dressing. The below is a very simple salad which fulfills these criteria beautifully, plus… it contains bacon.
Prawn Salad with Honey-Lemon dressing
I am always on the lookout for my next perfect recipe. To me, a perfect recipe fulfills the following five criteria: quick, uncomplicated, healthy, tasty and pretty to look at. So when I saw this simple shrimp salad recipe, in what I affectionately refer to as my German food porn (otherwise known as the beautifully illustrated and slobber-inducing Lust auf Genuss magazine), it was love at first sight. I have made this dish a number of times and it always stuns me how effortless and yet immensely satisfying it is.
