If you think of Chinese Chicken Salad as something that went mainstream in the 80s because of Wolfgang Puck and his Chinois Chicken Salad, you might be missing a chapter. Madame Wu's Garden, an LA restaurant, may have really originated it another 20 years earlier. Now closed, the lore is that that Madame Wu's salad…
Today's post comes courtesy of my handy recipe binder. I've been clipping and keeping recipes for 10+ years, and sure, it'd be easier to just bookmark them and go back to them online when I need them. But there's something reassuring about just going to binder and knowing they'll be there. I mean, what if you bookmarked some recipe that was on someone's Angelfire Web site in 1997? It's probably toast, long ago abandoned by someone who probably moved on to Blogger or hosting their own site. (Holy cow, I just googled it, Angelfire still exists and is part of Lycos. Lycos still exists? Really?)
Anyway, I clipped the recipes for the balsamic BBQ sauce and the chopped vegetable salad. They're great for summer grilling, but luckily both are still available online.In college, chicken stir fry was a mainstay for me and my roommates. It was something you could make a lot of, relatively cheaply, when we had friends over for Must See TV on Thursday nights. Friends, The Single Guy, Seinfeld, Caroline in the City and ER. I liked Jonathan Silverman in the Single Guy, but that 8:30 pm slot was always no man's land despite being bookended by Friends and Seinfeld.
Anyway, the stir fry. Back then, we used San-J Szechuan sauce, a Sun Bird packet for seasoning and a big bag of frozen stir fry vegetables.
Sometimes the standout in a meal surprises you. I expected the main topic of this post to be the chicken tacos we made using this recipe from the Flying Pig food truck, but what I want to talk about first is pineapple salsa.
I don't know if it's because this Spring has been very un-sunny and I'm jonesin' for a Hawaiian vacation, but this pineapple salsa really struck a chord. You'd think I never had a fruit salsa before. It was the perfect complement to the tacos.
When I reach for an Indian cookbook, my go-to is Curried Favors: Family Recipes from South India. You might recognize the name from her line of simmer sauces (the coconut curry is delish!) available at Costco and other stores. So, why Maya Kaimal, not Madhur Jaffrey, widely thought of as the authority on Indian cooking?…
Cumulus' Cracked Wheat and Freekeh Salad
One of our best meals on our trip to AUS/NZ last fall was at Cumulus in Melbourne. Sort of a shared plates concept, one of the dishes we had a was tabbouleh-like salad, with freekeh, bulghur, mint, parsley, almonds and barberries, garnished with dollops of creme fraiche. And it's…
