Once I started roasting vegetables, whether on the grill or in the oven, it became my preference. Roasting brings out natural sweetness while keeping crispness and sometimes adding a little char. In the winter, I’m not really in the mood … Continue reading Roasted Slaw
First, I have a hard time calling Memorial Day a holiday, having had a parent die in a war, but while it’s not all fireworks and getting drunk around here, I do make food like I would make for any … Continue reading Dishing Out the Holiday Food
I’ve been eating this dressing in an apple salad with walnuts and dried figs for lunch recently, but it would be good with any fruit or vegetable salad or with chicken strips or wings. The blue cheese is the star, … Continue reading Blue Cheese Ranch Dressing
I used flank steak, as I usually do, because I have never seen skirt steak in the two grocery stores I shop at. I think I saw it once when we lived in Texas in the mid-90s, but not since. … Continue reading Carne Asada Wraps with Pico de Gallo
It has started to warm up, but in that usual spring way of being 70° one day and 46° the next. Still, I can feel spring around the corner and am in the mood for a cold salad. The trick … Continue reading Chicken Bacon Ranch Pasta Salad
I had half a large head of Napa cabbage left from yesterday’s egg rolls, so a quick slaw seemed like a good idea. We were already in an Asian flavor mood, but I had some Fuji apples, too, and that’s … Continue reading Asian Apple Cabbage Slaw
When your garden gives you tomatoes, make salsa. All the gathered vegetables look so nice and ripe and neat before you begin, and then you create a gigantic mess of fruits and vegetables with skins and seeds to be removed, … Continue reading Peach Tomato Salsa
Side dish or dessert? Side dish or dessert? You’d think with only two choices, making one would be easy, but whenever I hear that option, my head starts swimming with all the possible dishes I could make. First, I lean toward dessert, because within the narrow confines of my family I am known for some pretty good ones, whether elaborate or simple. But then I start panicking about all the possible things that can go wrong, most of them having to do with accidental burning or insufficient rising, overworked crusts or underbaked centers, or missed ingredients—in a dessert, the littlest thing turns into a disaster.
The dessert disaster scenario takes only seconds and I start thinking about side dishes. Now, that’s a gigantic category encompassing appetizers, salads, vegetables, each one of those its own abyss. I’ll have to admit that what first popped into my head was a corn-black bean-mango salsa, but did I want to bring chips or turn it into a pasta salad? Not really. I quickly fell back on the old standby macaroni salad because it’s easy to make and hard to ruin, but with visions of seeing 12 different bowls of the stuff, I had to figure out how to make mine stand out or at least compete well with the others so as not to be faced with taking home the only untouched dish.
Bacon, obviously
A quick trip around the web showed me the right dressing to go with the bacon, so I’m taking Bacon Ranch Macaroni Salad with homemade ranch dressing.
For me, the mayo salads are all about the egg. Recipes included in this post: Egg Salad/Deviled Eggs, Potato Salad, Macaroni Salad Let’s begin with my disclosure that I am a mayo salad purist, pretty much, making all of them … Continue reading The Mayo Salads
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