What I love about this salad is how versatile it is. You can make as a light dish or as a main course, you can cook your vegetables or include them raw, you can make it spicy, savory, or even a little sweet. You can tailor the recipe easily to what is in season and readily available.
Also it saves and travels well (hello, picnic!) Keeping this is the house or whipping up for a pot-luck can save you from grabbing take-out or stopping off to pick-up preprepared potato salad from the grocery store.
Basic Idea:
- A noodle/pasta (buckwheat, wheat or regular pasta, whatever you choose)
- Vegetables
- Simple Asian Peanut Sauce (see below)
- Protein (Tofu or chicken) optional
The basic idea is that you make a simple sauce and toss it over cooked noodles and raw or cooked vegetables of your choice [you can add a chicken or tofu if desired] and serve. I usually serve this chilled but could also be served warm. Very easy and very very tasty.
Adjust the amount of sauce, vegetables and noodles to your liking.
Cooking has really changed in our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents. It used to be something that wasn't really thought about very much. Our grandparents mostly just prepared something for dinner that was based on what they had eaten as children, usually culturally influenced "standard" dishes. Since the 1960s, what it meant to cook has changed dramatically. At times it had been such a chore and women felt that they had to bear the responsibility of all of the shopping and cooking. This burden, in a time when woman were also working, led to the idea that the quicker and the easier the meal the better.
The dawn of the prepared foods.
We live in a world where health care costs are skyrocketing, where industrial chemicals are making their way into everything (not the least of which is breastmilk), where many of us work more, have more "stuff", but are less happy.
We live in a world where farms, as we knew them, are disappearing,where most of our food is picked well before it is ripe and imported from all over the world, where most of us do not know the people we buy our food from, and where it is harder and harder to support a family in a rural community. We live in a world where a large portion of our food comes out of a factory, where we can't understand the ingredient labels and where our hamburgers are made mostly from corn products.
An easy place to start to rediscover cooking is to begin by making meals based on what you have in your house and what is in season and available at your local market.
Making meals that are as simple or complex as you'd like. Meals that can be improvised.
Meals where the preparation is not stressful and doesn't require a lot of planning.
Getting back to simply cooking. Simply cooking real food.
My name is Julie and I invite you into my kitchen (and a corner of my life) because food is really important to me. Growing, buying, preparing and eating of food is fundamentally gratifying to me. It is intrinsically linked to our cultural identity and life itself. And for some reason we seem to have become distanced from all of it.
I hope that others can discover (or rediscover) the pure pleasure and satisfaction that home cooked food can bring.