Last week heralded the most depressing day of the year (good news - the rest of the year can only get better!) It’s cold and icy in NYC and the sun is acting too bashful to push its way through the clouds.

I noticed that it was about this time last year that Elise at Simply Recipes posted her version of Kale and Seaweed salad. I’ve been craving seaweed salad ever since I ordered it on New Years Day at Zen Palate. I can’t prove this scientifically, but heck, this is the time of year for seaweed salad!

I’ve forged ahead and simplified this into a full meal. It’s a kicky little dish that will fortify you against this toe-numbing cold and take the edge off your winter blahs.

Serves: 4
Time: 40 minutes

Kale and Seaweed Salad Bowl

3/4 oz dried wakame* seaweed
1 bunch kale, cleaned, deribbed and cut into 1/2 inch ribbons
3 Tbsp rice vinegar
3 Tbsp soy sauce, tamari, or Braggs
2 Tbsp sesame oil
1 tsp honey
1 inch ginger, minced
2 Tbsp sesame seeds
1 cup of wasabi peas
brown rice
12 - 16 oz firm or extra-firm tofu

Cook your brown rice - the rest of the meal can be prepared well within the time it takes to cook brown rice.

Wilt the kale in a skillet. You don’t have to add anything extra to the skillet - the water clinging to it from the washing is enough to do the trick. This takes about 10 minutes.

Mix up your dressing: add the vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, honey, and ginger to a tupperware and shake until honey has dissolved.

Cut the tofu into cute, 1″ cubes. I like the soft, raw tofu to contrast with the silky kale crunchy sesame seeds and wasabi peas, so all I do with my tofu is bring it up to room temp and let it be. You may stirfry it, however, if you desire.

Soak the wakame in water for 5 minutes. Drain.

Combine the seaweed with the cooked kale in a salad bowl. Top with the dressing. Mix.

In a small dry skillet fry the sesame seeds gently until golden. Just takes a few minutes.

Then, assemble your bowl the following way:

Enjoy whilst imagining summer.

Why is it that there are some foods that you want to taste just like they do in a restaurant?

For instance, I want my thin crust pizza to taste like Anna Maria’s greasy Brooklyn-style pizza and my deep dish pizza to taste Chicago-style like it’s from someplace like Gino’s East.  I’m also quite fond of the Southwestern Salad at The Cheesecake Factory (minus the chicken, of course) and have made a fairly accurate reproduction at home though it doesn’t quite have the presentation pizzazz of the huge mound of shredded lettuce and tortilla strips that you get at the restaurant.  I’ve also heard that the Buffalo Wings at Hooters are quite the industry standard, but I don’t eat buffalo, or chicken-that-supposed-to-taste-like-buffalo, and furthermore that bulbous owl-eye logo freaks me out.

Miso soup is easy to make at home but I’ve never quite gotten it to have the same restauranty miso soup flavor that all Japanese restaurants can someone clone quite flawlessly.  What I have, however, discovered is the secret to that other Japanese restaurant mainstay, the Japanese salad.  It’s light, sweet, crunchy and makes an easy pairing with any stir-fry.  It’s restaurant-style deliciousness in the privacy of your own home, without strange buffalos or owls.

Serves: 4
Time: 20 minutes

Japanese Salad and Dressing

1/2 a head of iceberg lettuce, finely shredded
1 small head of Napa cabbage, finely shredded
1 cucumber, julienned or sliced
4 carrots, julienned or sliced

Shred the lettuce and cabbage.
Slice the cucumber and carrots on the bias (diagonally) quite thin.  Or, if you’ve really got some time, it’s more authentic to julienne them.

Japanese Dressing

2 Tbsp soy sauce
2 Tbsp rice vinegar
2 Tbsp sesame oil
2 Tbsp honey
¼ inch garlic
¼ inch ginger

Put all the above ingredients in a jar/tupperware and shake until well combined.  Pour over the salad and serve.

Upon my urging my mom gifted me a pressure cooker for Christmas last year. Since then, my pressure cooker (or, p.c., as I like to call it) has been lying around my cupboard, directions inside, collecting dust. The whole idea of cooking under pressure frightened me well away from p.c. for 10 1⁄2 months. It’s my pleasure to report that the two below items helped me reach a tipping point and I used my darling p.c. for the very first time for this recipe.

1. Li’l Sis used to be her dorm’s fire safety marshal
Since I’m living with a ex-fire marshal I figure however scary using a pressure cooker is for the first time the Li’l Sis can step in and save the day. The good news is: using a pressure cooker isn’t scary all, quite the contrary; it’s easy and letting the steam out when depressurizing is pretty darn fun. The bad news is: after witnessing the Li’l Sis toast a flatbread on the stove over the open flame I found out she was only her dorm’s fire safety marshal in order to claim one of those plastic red fireman’s hats, and probably shouldn’t be depended upon in issues of fire safety.

2. wheat berries
These little things are my new favorite food item. They are a whole grain, a good source of vegetarian protein, wonderfully chewy, and fun to eat. Wheat berries, despite their cute name, are just the whole wheat grain minus only the inedible outer hull. The only problem with wheat berries is that they usually take 1 1⁄2 hours to cook. Far too long for a busy girl. P.c. to the rescue – they only take 40 minutes in a pressure cooker.

Serves: 6
Time: 55 minutes with a pressure cooker

Warm Wheat Berry and Apple Salad

2 cups water (3 if not using a pressure cooker)
2 cups wheat berries
1 large or 2 small apples, cubed small
½ cup dried cranberries
½ cup golden raisins
½ cup walnuts
2 tbsp rice vinegar
3 tbsp orange or apple juice
splash of olive oil
½ tsp salt

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Ali From The Valley is a fellow event planner at The Met and a near-daily inspiration for vanesscipes.  We work our cute little tails off planning parties but we always have time to get slightly off-topic to talk about what we’re making for dinner, what we ate last night, what might mix with what, how to make an existing recipe healthier, what IS Tom Cruise thinking, etc.

All the credit for this recipe goes to Ali, who has my thanks for providing it to me, free of any event planning duty.  I was a little put off by chopping chick peas (A little over the top dontcha think, Ali?) but the sisters passionately devoured their salad and, bits of chopped veggies falling ecstatically from their mouths, declared it’s fun-ness, fresh-aility, and filling-ocity.

By the way, the cat-grass looking stuff in the photo is actually chives from my fire escape garden.  I feel like the photo needed extra whimsy to capture the true feeling of this eclectic salad.

Serves: 4-5
Time: 1 sister = 40 minutes.  3 sisters = 20 minutes

Salad

½ a regular-sized head of romaine lettuce, shredded
1 cluster of scallions, chopped
1 small red onion, chopped
1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes halved or quartered
1 can drained garbanzo beans (yes, need to be chopped)
1 ½ cups of pitted cured olives chopped
1 large cucumber, diced
4 to 8 oz of reduced fat feta, crumbled
2 avocados, diced
¼ regular sized head of red cabbage

As I like to say: chop, chop, choparoo.  Chop everything and put into a large salad bowl.  Douse with the dressing.

Dressing

4 Tbl olive oil
4 Tbl balsamic vinegar
1 Tbl mustard
2 cloves garlic, minced
½ tsp salt
pepper

Combine everything in a small tupperware and shake!

This week, a friend introduced me to the famous gourmet Middle Eastern and specialty food store Sahadis located in downtown Brooklyn.  Now my sisters and I are addicted to the hummus and it got me thinking - but not too hard because it’s 100 degrees in New York - about what sort of Middle Eastern inspired dish I could make without generating too much heat or effort. 

So here’s the result of my semi-effort.  A very cool, very flavorful, very worthwhile summer salad with lots of veggies and grape leaves from a jar.  Keep everything in the fridge (except the tomatoes - that’s bad!) before you start so it’s cold, and this is one of those salads that gets even better when it’s been chilling out in the fridge so the flavors mingle.  Make the rice ahead of time, store in the fridge, enlist your friends with good knife skillz to chop, and the salad’s ready to go in a jiffy. 

Like most of my recent summer posts, it’s perfect for a picnic or potluck.  Just try not to get addicted.

Serves: 4 generously
Time: 30 minutes plus rice cooking time and at least an hour for the rice to cool

Rice

1 cup wild rice or wild rice & brown rice mix

Cook the rice according to the package directions.  I cooked mine with 2 cups of water in a rice cooker.  Love the rice cooker - it always makes the rice come out perfect.  Keep the rice in the fridge until chilled. 

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