An intriguing mixture of flavors characterizes this complex salad, with sweet, sour, pungent, and fruity blending in a sauce that shows its Chinese origins with soy sauce, plum sauce, and sesame oil. It makes a light but satisfying summer meal or an exotic addition to the buffet table.
Excerpted from Happy in the Kitchen: The Craft of Cooking, the Art of Eating by Michel Richard (Artisan, 2006). Copyright 2006 by Michel Richard.
Ingredients
Sometimes if you cut a vegetable in a different fashion it will make it seem entirely new.
Country women in Romagna used to bake these potatoes each week along with their homemade bread. Cloaked in olive oil and flavored with bits of cured pork, rosemary, garlic and tomatoes, the potatoes roasted near the opening of the big bread ovens, where the women could easily turn and baste them with the pan juices. The feast of the day was the crusty potatoes, fresh-baked bread, and homemade wine. Not a bad idea today, but these roasted potatoes are good with nearly everything from a green salad to chicken to seafood.
From Learning to Cook with Marion Cunningham, by Marion Cunningham.
This vegetable ragu is one of those sublime one-dish meals that for me captures all the nurturing goodness of the Italian food I was raised with. What Ciambotta is to southern Italians, Stufato is to northerners—the concepts are the same. Vegetables, from greens and beans and zucchini to tomatoes and peppers, all cook together, making their own sauce and becoming a lavish vegetable stew. Merely heat a little olive oil in a big shallow pan, stir in whatever is fresh and good at the moment, sear everything, then cover. When vegetables cook in their own juices, their flavors open up and their textures go from crisp to silken.
Ingredients