Food Friday: Purple prose

You’ll have to go somewhere else for your Super Bowl snacks ideas this year – although – between you and me – you really can’t do much better than a party-size bag of nacho cheese Doritos.*

While some writers wait for divine inspiration before angling their fingers over their keyboards, others of us wander dazedly through the grocery store, looking for ideas. During our COVID year I’d rush tearing through Food Lion- colors, packaging, smells, people! It was all there. I found myself photographing some loose carrots on our kitchen countertop over the weekend: the low angle of the sun setting made the carrots radiate an unearthly orange glow that I think I have only seen in the incandescent light of the genre paintings by the Vermeer and Leyster. This week, while on another motivational stroll through Food Lion (after I had scoped out the extensive and flashy Valentine candy display) I was drawn to this display of radicchio. Look at those colors! Raspberry, magenta, plum, magenta, amaranthine, violet, amethyst, fuchsia, aubergine and carmine! What could I do with those colors in real life? It’s time to make a colorful winter salad.

I love a nice leafy, crunchy salad. I was raised on iceberg lettuce salads, so the discovery of romaine lettuce in college shifted the tectonic plates of my tetchy palate. I used to eat sun-warmed tomatoes out in the garden every summer, but grew up eating tasteless, refrigerated, hothouse tomatoes in my salads all winter long. Luckily time does march on, and we can avail ourselves of healthier greens all year long. Our local farmers have also come into the twenty-first century and are ready to nourish us with their winter bounties. Look for parsnips, garlic, turnips, rutabagas, leeks, lettuce, spinach, kale, chard, potatoes (sweet or regular), and cabbage.

It might be a new year, but that doesn’t mean that I am any less inclined to take the easiest way out in preparing dinner. There is nothing like enjoying a lighter-than-air salad for a summer dinner, though in the winter it needs to be much heartier than our summertime frolics with cool cucumbers, airy vinaigrettes, and artful splashes of lemon juice. We need calories and heft right about now, just so we can go outside and do battle with snowy sidewalks, and scrape the windshield while the wind blows and the snow is still falling.

I also like to use up leftovers when I make salad, no matter what time of year it is. This is our new budget in action – less waste! In the summer I will shred leftover chicken and fling it across a bed of crisp lettuce, with a handful of sunflower seeds and some chunky homegrown tomatoes. This week I warmed up a leftover chicken breast, and sliced it, and nestled it on a bed of spinach leaves. I cooked the last three slices of bacon, and then used the resulting bacon fat for frying the best, and crunchiest, croutons (made from a loaf of old-ish French bread from the weekend). I nestled a couple of still-warm soft-boiled eggs within some of the spinach curls and scattered the bacon over everything. A heavy, homemade vinaigrette, redolent with garlic, was drizzled over the plates. Add candles. Yumsters. A warm, nutritious salad, and an efficient use of leftovers. You could even add a side dish of (canned) soup, if the shoveling has gone into overtime, and you are feeling generous.

Homemade Vinaigrette
6 tablespoons vinegar (use the fancy stuff – the ones you got for Christmas)
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1/2 cup olive oil
1 crushed garlic clove
Pinch of ground black pepper
Pinch of nice sea salt

Bacon-fried Croutons
Bacon makes everything better – and you know it!
Cook 3 or 4 bacon slices in a frying pan. Save the grease. (Sometimes I add a little olive oil to make a deeper puddle of cooking grease – use your judgment.)
Add a handful of cubed French bread to the frying pan, cooking for 2 to 3 minutes, until golden brown on all sides. Drain on paper towels. Lightly sprinkle garlic powder, onion powder and Lawry’s Seasoning Salt over the crotons. Using Lawry’s is crucial – make no substitute – not even for “Slap Ya Mama”.

The dark of winter is a good time to introduce hints of color and sparkle to your salad. Reds, oranges, purples, yellows – a veritable rainbow of earthly delights. Cranberries! Apples! Cheddar cheese! Pomegranate seeds! Kale Salad
You can throw everything in a main course winter salad, by cleaning out the produce drawer in the fridge and adding shredded cabbage, carrots, Brussels sprouts, roasted squash, or chunks of apples. Martha knows best:
Radicchio Salad

Radicchio Salad with Oranges

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
—Jack Kerouac

*Food52 Super Bowl Snacks

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.