Always look for sea salt.  Such things as table salt have that twang of the chemical industry about them.  Experiment with sea salts as they can vary dramatically in shape and flavor. It’s amazing how a particular salt can be to a certain dish.

Back in March, my friends Brent and Harmony managed to score me a day pass to South By Southwest.  It was incredibly kind of them, and so to show my gratitude I offered to make a multi-course dinner in return.  Since they’re both vegetarians this was the perfect chance for me to burn through a bunch of salad and vegetable recipes from “The Cookbook”.  A few of the courses were from recipes I’ve already covered like the Cucumber, Mustard, And Dill salad and Celery Salt And Boiled Eggs, but most were brand new, like this one.

I do feel a bit bad as this “recipe” isn’t really what most people would call a recipe.  I consider it more of an insightful suggestion than anything else.

The morning before the dinner, my wife and I visited the Farmers Market in downtown Austin looking for the freshest possible ingredients.  After picking up some green garlic, potted herbs and small cucumbers we came across these perfect breakfast radishes.  Later on that evening, right before I needed to serve them, the radishes were scrubbed gently in cool water to remove any dirt.

A quick trimming of the tops and tails and the radishes were ready to be eaten.  I served them alongside some nice unsalted butter and coarse sea salt.  This method is wonderful because it allows you to tailor each bite to your particular desires.  The radishes on their own had a very crispy, firm texture with a subtle and pleasing bitterness.  Brent really seemed to enjoy the simple, straightforward presentation and said as much as we munched away.

Once we had finished eating the radishes,  I washed the leftover leaves, tore them slightly and dressed the whole lot with a simple vinaigrette.  Harmony is a big fan of pepper, so the intensely powerful leaves were right up her alley.  The bitterness and staggering bite were just too much for me so I gladly surrendered the entire bowl.

One down, seventy four to go.

This goes very well with such things as cured salmon, mackerel, and smoked cod’s roe, or is very happily eaten by itself.

Real quick: Eating Nose To Tail and Medieval Cooking. Go visit!

Ah, June.  June in Texas.

Damn, it’s hot.  Aside from a big glass of iced tea, cold salads are just perfect for this time of the year and they don’t come more refreshing than this one.

As the title states, cucumbers are the foundation of this salad.  Since the outside thermometer kept rising higher and higher, I decided to throw these bad boys into the freezer for a few minutes to get them nice and cold.

When the cucumbers were frigid I removed them from the freezer, peeled their skin off and scooped out the seeds with a spoon.  The pulp was reserved for use in cocktails like this one.

Next I cut the cucumber flesh on an angle in the hopes of making “strange wonderful shapes.”  The little half moon slices were placed in a colander and tossed with a teaspoon of salt to draw the excess moisture out and promote a crunchy texture with a bit of give.  The cucumbers were left alone for an hour to let the salt really do its thing.

Fifteen minutes before the cucumber slices were ready my wife and I started working on the dressing.  We added a tiny amount of sugar to some white wine vinegar and stirred until it dissolved.  Mr. Henderson stresses that the dressing shouldn’t be sweet, rather the sugar should be subliminal.  A spoonful of Dijon mustard was stirred in along side copious amounts of extra virgin olive oil to create an emulsion.  To finish, fresh ground black pepper helped bring a little extra heat to the party.

With a smidgen of pride, I present you some fresh dill from my tiny herb garden.  The feathery leaves were picked from their stems and roughly chopped.

To compose the final dish I removed the salted cucumber slices from the colander and patted them dry with probably way too many paper towels.  A few teaspoons of the dressing and a sprinkle of dill on top, a quick toss to evenly distribute everything and it was done.

What an awesome salad.  I mean, simple preparation, simple construction, straightforward flavor.  What’s not to like?  The cucumber ended up being slightly flexible yet still gave an agreeable crunch when eaten.  The salt hadn’t infused itself too deeply, but there was just enough left over for seasoning.  The tart and tangy dressing and the grassy dill added new dimensions to the salad without killing the cucumber flavor.  Harmony had been achieved.

If it’s hot in your neck of the woods, consider giving this salad a try.  It’ll help soothe some of summer’s fiery bite.

One down, seventy seven to go.

You can pick the snails for this salad yourself.  I have done this, though it is quite emotional.  A few years ago on the Tiree in the Hebrides we collected a positive feast’s worth of snails, but what was to follow was too much for one of our party.  You have to starve them, so they were left in a bucket covered with pierced plastic wrap to prevent escape and left to purge.  Days seemed to pass watching the poor captive snails leaving trails of snail poo on the sides of the bucket.  Eventually someone cracked and freed them, much to everyone’s relief.  If you are of harder heart and can get over this difficult stage, which takes about four days, you should then par-boil your snails for about 20 minutes.  Remove them from their shells with a pin. (Alternatively, you can replace them in their shells and smother them with butter, garlic and parsley.)  Simmer for 1 hour, by which point they will be ready for the salad.  There are American snail farms now, so fresh snails are available.

Well, this recipe was a roller coaster.  The high of finding “fresh” snails down to the reality of what I had actually found, all the way to the rush of having everything work out in the end.

While meandering through my local Asian market, I found a huge selection of frozen snails. Well, they actually had 6 different varieties, but when you think about it, when was the last time you saw any snail options at a local megamarket?

I picked up a tray of frozen rice snails, thinking that I had found a better option than canned snails.

Per the instructions in the foreword, I covered the snails with water and boiled them for 20 minutes.  The water turned an opaque milky color, and scum rose to the top of the pot.  I skimmed multiple times as the snails boiled.

Once the 20 minutes was up, I dumped the snails out, rinsed them with water and my wife and I began trying to remove the meat from the shells.  “Trying” being the operative word.  Every time I got just a little bit of snail out of the shell, the meat tore, and what I did manage to wring from the shells was scrawny and pathetic.

At this point, I remembered reading about escargot from another cookbook I have:

I could lie to you.   I could tell you to use fresh snails, implying that we, of course, use only fresh ones at the restaurant.  The truth?  I don’t know any restaurant, have never in twenty-eight years seen any U.S. restaurant–no matter how good or prestigious–use fresh snails.  Oh, a lot of them have snail shells, but they stuff them with snails out of a can.  I’m sure someone uses fresh.  Somewhere.  But let’s face it, even if you could get fresh snails (and I would have no idea where to send you), by the time you’ve had a good look at the things in their living, natural glory, by the time you’ve dug them out of their shells for the first time…you’re likely not going to want to eat them.

So do as the pros do:  Find the best, priciest, preferably French canned snails (though the Taiwanese ones have been fooling the French chefs for years) and use those.

There we go.  Anthony Bourdain has absolved me for using canned snails.  My wife ran to her workplace and came back with this:

Highfalutin canned French snails!

I finely chopped a some shallots and garlic cloves, and added them and a splash of olive oil to a heated pan to soften.

In the mean time, I began pulling leaves off of my head of lettuce. Sadly, this is not actual Oak Leaf Lettuce.  In my research for this dish, I found that an acceptable substitute was red leaf butterhead lettuce, so I picked a large head of it up.  I despise making substitutions, but some things I’m just not able to find despite my best efforts.

With the shallots and garlic finally soft, I added a cup of red wine to the pan and turned up the heat.  I was instructed to reduce the wine down until I had a movable “gunge”.

As the wine reduced, four pieces of toast were broken up and added to the lettuce leaves.

Finally, I cracked open the can of snails and pulled one out.  You’ll have to take my word for it, but this is a huge improvement over what I was pulling out of the shells before.  The snail meat was added to the shallot/garlic/wine sauce pan, seasoned with salt and pepper and then heated until everything was at the proper temperature.

The snails and wine reduction was added to the bowl along with a few splashes of Vinaigrette and a big handful of chopped curly parsley.

After a quick tossing, the salad was finished. The wine reduction really set the tone for the salad as tangy and savory.  The lettuce and parsley added peppery notes, while the snails… well, they really didn’t add much at all.  My wife and I talked about it, and we both agree that if we hadn’t have known that snails were in the salad, we’d have never guessed that they were anything more than little meaty bits of cooked mushrooms.  This is an interesting and tasty salad, but not something that I’d go out of my way to make on a regular basis.

One down, one hundred and two to go.

Amazingly uplifting powers for a simple salad.

I posted a picture of the duck legs with carrots I made last week on eGullet. One of the members, -sheila mooney, pointed out that I had incorrectly used just half of the duck leg. After thinking about it for five minutes, I was banging my head on the wall. For some reason “drumstick” = “leg” in my mind. So the whole “extra thigh pieces” weren’t exactly extra. But that’s okay, they were put to good use and now I have ample amounts of duck stock on hand. It also meant that I haven’t fallen victim to the “biggy-size” American mentality yet. However, I had done the recipe incorrectly and I needed to redo it.

A few invites later and I had dinner guests for duck legs, take two. It also gave me a chance to knock out another recipe. A salad would fit the bill perfectly. The only problem there was that a lot of the salad recipes wouldn’t exactly mesh well with duck legs as the main course or would take a lot more time than I had available. Fortunately the Anchovy, Little Gem, and Tomato salad was quick and almost all of the ingredients were available.

The interesting part of the salad was the “Little Gem” lettuce. I looked high and low for two heads of little gem with no luck. The closest thing I could find was the Living Butter Lettuce from Live Gourmet. Mr. Henderson asks in the ingredients list for tomatoes that are the happiest possible, so I found six ruby red orbs on the vine. Some curly parsley, the most expensive tinned anchovies I could find and I had everything I needed for the salad.

Except the vinaigrette. I’ll admit this was the first time I had ever made a vinaigrette. Considering how easy it was I’m a bit puzzled why people buy salad dressing in the bottle at all. I’ll never go back again now. You just take some crushed garlic, a little Dijon Mustard, lemon juice, white wine vinegar, olive oil and–pardon the catch phrase–bam, vinaigrette. I poured it into a squeeze bottle and I was done.

I set the oven on medium high and once it was preheated, dropped in the tomatoes that had each been cut in half and seasoned. The heat softened them and made them sweeter at the same time. I then chopped about a handful of parsley and tossed it with the lettuce and a healthy dash of the vinaigrette. The lettuce and parsley mixture was divided into four bowls, the now roasted tomatoes placed on top and the anchovies added.

The salad was light and very refreshing, perfectly setting the tone for a fun Friday night dinner amongst friends. The anchovies were a bit on the fishy side for my liking though. Next time I’ll try and find even higher end anchovies.

And here she is: Duck Legs with Carrots. Done correctly.

Next week, I’ll be writing about the absolutely wonderful Boiled Ham and Parsley Sauce.

One down, one hundred and thirty five to go.