How to make Oakleaf Lettuce with Strawberry Balsamic Salad Dressing

“Dusk is just an illusion because the sun is either above the horizon or below it. And that means that day and night are linked in a way that few things are. There cannot be one without the other yet they cannot exist at the same time. How would it feel I remember wondering to be always together yet far apart?” ― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

Nearly a week ago we drove 100 miles away from home and made our way mid-morning through the sultry heat and thick NYC traffic. We reached airport just in time, trying to save every bit of it for the last minute togetherness. We hugged D for one last time, in much of an emotional goodbye this time over the last year. Our little girl is now big enough to understand what separation in true sense means and what it is like being away from her dad for couple of several months, much of which she hadn't known all this while.

We left our soul back at home that served us for these 3 worthy months of time off and family time with D. Filled with beautiful memories of home and travel, spurred with endearing moments of togetherness, we left for our home back in India with a heavy heart. Across we flew passing by oceans, green pastures of Europe, desserts of Middle East, traversing continents and surging ahead of the horizon, witnessing the dawn and dusk twice in 24 hours. As much my eyes were filled with marvel at the world below, my mind was filled with anxiety of the long parting we have far borne as a family for so long. All of this comes with some hope that we will soon be together for good. A hope that is positive and stronger than any other besiege.

We are living through jet lag and zonal differences at the moment. It may take a while, though not too long as we set back into a wonted rhythm. As the sun shines high up in D's land and brings glory of summer and sunshine, so comes this recipe from me to you for greens that were not so familiar to me, atleast not until D introduced me to a land where salad greens make a prominent presence on their aisle in almost every supermarket. I had little known Oakleaf greens, till D randomly picked a pack of salad greens on our regular grocery shopping one day and I instantly fell in love with them there on. They are wonderfully tasty and versatile with cheese and salad dressing of your choice, if paired. The Strawberry Balsamic Dressing gives a kick of tang against the sweet fruity jam, spiced up with liberal doses of fresh cracked pepper. I suggest you taste the sauce for yourself and adjust the ratio of sweet and tang to your liking. It flaunts well dribbled on crisp lettuce leaves, (either Oakleaf or Romaine would do) and saltiness from fresh feta, adorned with some berries and walnuts. Additionally, I love to serve this salad with cheese sandwiched artisan bread; which obviously does not make it gluten-free, if you abide by it. Choice is really yours.

Oakleaf Lettuce with Strawberry Balsamic Dressing

INGREDIENTS

5 cups Oakleaf Lettuce, red and green
2 tablespoons Feta cheese
2 tablespoons mix of berries like Cranberries and Goji berries
8-20 Walnuts

For the Strawberry Balsamic Salad Dressing

1 tablespoon strawberry jam, preferable homemade or low sugar
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper, to taste

DIRECTIONS

Heat the balsamic vinegar in a small saucepan and bring to a rolling boil. Reduce the heat and simmer till the vinegar reduces to half and becomes thick. Turn off the heat and whisk in the strawberry jam and the extra-virgin olive oil. Season it liberally with salt and pepper.

Place the Oakleaf greens along with mix of berries and walnuts in a wide salad bowl. Drizzle the salad dressing and toss it well to coat evenly in dressing. Serve.

Cheese Croutons Salad | Dijon Mustard and Honey Dressing Recipe

Earlier this month, we placed admissions for our daughter with a school here. It's her first stint of being at school and experiencing life outside the home here in the US. What we call as Nursery back in India, Kindergarten Prep is what they are known here. We opted the 3 day class with 3 hours per day to start with, where our little girl can play, learn and socialize with kids of her age like she did back in India. Unlike last year, I did not have butterflies fluttering my tummy this time around. :)

The school comes with promises. Like most schools do. With all those colorful brochures and pamphlets where couple of tiny tots from different ethnic races in their colorful attire thump their hands high up in the air with a tight fist symbolizing they will emerge to be toppers and winners, I pinned huge hopes on my daughter's learning here. The first two weeks went off in a whiz. Nothing much done. She walked in, played and walked out. She came back home happy with ugly sketch pen scribbles on paper that were below her capacity, or even for a three year old I suppose. Scribbling on paper is the first thing she did as 2 year old toddler. As a 4 year old today, she is equipped well to read and write alphabets and numbers and count them with ease. She draws well within borders and identifies good deal of animals, birds, colors, fruits, vegetables, et al. I expected continuity to her learning instead of re-learning those basics that are of least value to her.

Back in India where she spent a year at pre-school, the teaching curriculum was different than it is here. She went to school in an odd pairing of green blue uniform set, her most hated attire that she never recalls or speaks about here. Teaching, as monotonous it may sound was its methodical best. She had text books for each month - a month for colors, another on seasons, a month for food, a month dedicated to people around us, a month each of something to cover the year. She carried back homework every single day. There were notes with signatures exchanged between the teacher and the parent. Her school followed the Western style of teaching and curriculum, they claim. Yet, there was no respite to uniforms, truck load of homework, project work that seemed more a burden to the parents rather than the children. But in all, there was a lot she learnt progressively over the past one year. There were regular PTAs, a detailed progress card and it made me quite happy.

But here she goes. Essentially to a playschool in real sense. Play, fun and creative learning, they say. Scribbling on paper is no creative learning in my opinion. Its what toddlers do, not preschoolers. D says I could be the typical stereotype Indian mother who expects a lot of academic driven learning from the school and her daughter. I may not be the one, but if I am, I see no harm.

It could take a while for me to come to terms with these differences. Not too long, I know. But by then it will be time for us to head back to India. Till then its stress free, happy learning and exploring for her. For now, I see joy in her making new friends, mingling into diverse cultures and am glad she is enjoying every bit of her preschooler life.

Coming to the recipe, I have this gorgeous salad for you that is not actually complicated to put together as it may sound by the length of this recipe below. You may choose store bought bread croutons or just skip them all together. Even with the basic ingredients this salad gets notched up with sharpness from Feta cheese and Dijon mustard and Honey dressing. The cheesy bread croutons give a lovely crunch and go very well with the sweet-sour salad dressing.

Salad Leaves with Croutons, Pine Nuts, Feta Cheese with Dijon Mustard and Honey Dressing

INGREDIENTS

3 cups packed organic salad leaves (I used a mix of variety of lettuce, baby spinach, romaine, kale, arugula, etc.)
1 tbsp. cup pine nuts
2 tbsp. Feta cheese

For the cheese bread croutons:

2-3 slices of whole wheat bread
1-2 tbsp. olive oil
1 tsp. Italian herbs
2 tbsp. of mild cheddar

For the Dijon Mustard and Honey salad dressing:

1/2 tbsp. lime juice
1 tbsp. mayonnaise
1 tbsp. olive oil
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
1 tbsp. honey
Salt and pepper, to taste

DIRECTIONS

Chop bread slices to cubes of 1.5" each and arrange them side by side on a baking tray. Drizzle some olive oil and sprinkle some dried Italian herbs on them. Bake them in a pre-heated oven at 180 deg C (356 deg F) for 14-16 mins flipping over mid way to ensure even browning. Grate 2 tbsp. of cheddar cheese evenly over these bread cubes and bake them further for 5-6 mins. Remove and allow it to cool on a wire rack. They should crisp well as they cool down.

In a large salad bowl, toss the mixed salad leaves along with the baked bread croutons and pine nuts. Set aside to be tossed with dressing of your choice.

For the salad dressing:

Whisk lime juice, mayonnaise, olive oil, Dijon mustard, honey, salt and pepper in a bowl.

To put the salad together, drizzle a generous amount of the prepared Dijon mustard and honey dressing and toss them together. Serve immediately.

Notes:

To make it gluten free, skip the bread croutons or substitute the same with gluten free bread.

About 4 years ago when my husband made his first trip to the States, he had asked me what is it he could get for us from there. Like there was no tomorrow, I had requested bag full of goodies that he bought from there. My list ran long and seemed endless. That was the time I was hardly a year into blogging and baking and photography were the new fad. A large springform pan, the mezzaluna, a pie dish, few ramekins, many muffin cases, dried cranberries, blueberries, ounces of walnuts, almonds, artefacts, photography gears, and what not. He patiently went hopping shop to shop carrying my list around and satisfying my needs and wants. The bags were stuffed to their brim, as if they were about to burst out, crossing their baggage limits on his return back home. As he opened each suitcase, I was fascinated like a kid opening her birthday presents with excitement. Over the years, I have hardly used the springform pan. The pie pan worked best for cakes, while the ramekins made their neat appearance for chutneys, sauces and dips to be served when we had guests around. I used mezzaluna a couple of times to chop the greens, but it was too pricey was daily use and nothing seemed to work better than the good ol' kitchen knife. The only solace, I've used the muffin cases on couple of occasions and exploited the dry fruits and nuts in almost every dessert I made.

Last year, when my husband made frequent trips abroad, I asked him to travel light, partly because my home was brimming with so much clutter that I could not afford to add more to it, and mainly because what I assumed then to be unavailable in Indian markets is now widely available in most stores. From exotic ingredients to baking essentials, its far more simpler to fetch them now than it was long ago.

On his previous trip, he came back home with a pack of organic Quinoa to surprise me. Having never tasted them in the past I was quite apprehensive about what they would taste like. The first I made them, it wasn't best of those grains I had, yet over couple of recipes I have acquired their taste and quite like them now. My simplest way is to consume them as salad. They have a lovely crunch when lightly toasted. Balsamic adds a great depth of flavour and tang, while brown sugar counters it with a mild sweetness that I adore it. Simple, yet flavoursome.

Quinoa Salad with Balsamic, Mint & Walnuts

INGREDIENTS

1 cup / 150 gm Quinoa
1 tsp. Butter
1 tbsp. Balsamic Vinegar
1 tsp. Brown Sugar
2-3 sprigs of Mint leaves
5-6 Walnut Kernels
1 Tomato, diced
Handful of Black Olives and Jalapeños (optional)
Salt and Pepper to taste
Processed Cheese, grated (optional)

DIRECTIONS

Cook 1 cup quinoa in about 2 cups of water. Quinoa takes about 15-20 minutes to cook and is done when its translucent with a visible white ring around the center kernel. Remove the cooked quinoa from heat and allow to sit five minutes. Fluff them gently with a fork. Next, in a wok, add a teaspoon of butter and lightly saute the cooked quinoa till its slightly toasted. Add salt, brown sugar and balsamic vinegar. Saute the quinoa for a minute so that most of the balsamic vinegar is absorbed. Turn off the flame and add in the mint leaves, walnuts, diced tomato, olives and jalapeños. Season with pepper to taste. Serve cold and top with cheese and more walnuts before serving.

The western world has been calling that the spring has sprung in, oh though finally. But for us here in Bangalore, even calling the beckoning summer as summertime is nothing short of an understatement. With the mercury touching an all high of 38-40 degrees C by the day, and not getting any better by the nights, adding the woes of humidity in air, our sweat glands at their mechanical best, what feels like is an hour’s workout at gym even in our fan-sped, well ventilated, curtain drawn indoors. The whirling fans do no good, neither the chill of cold icy water and ice creams right out of the fridge. The much esteemed task of domestic grind has taken a swift backseat and I rather enjoy the lethargy of laying lazily like a couch potato, gazing endlessly at the spinning fan, as and when time and my toddler permit. Honestly, I’ve never known what Bangalore summers are like, because of all those glorious 14 years spent here, Bangalore never had a summer, or the real scorching Indian summers that I am talking about. But finally, they come.

Heck this summer, the rising temperatures and its woes that creeps in several uncanny thoughts in fists of laziness.

Pleasant as the weathers used to be, once upon a time, the drastic weather change, the tangential increase in vehicular pollution, the infiltrating population, depleting water tables, the perpetually increasing carbon footprint and the reducing green covers that we’ve always been famous for (well, some day that may remain just a history) have been a few direct promoters to the current state of weather affairs. I am cynical to the educated crowd in craze of the luring mall culture, the fast food takeaways amounting to corpus non degradable wastes, the lazy bums who need a car for singles and the little consideration they care for the exhausting fossil fuels, those loosers who fail to carry a bag along because they can do away with the plastic ones at dirt cheap price of few rupees, all at the cost of our environment. Equally pathetic have been our rainwater harvesting and waste management techniques, a rare to find garbage segregation, or may I say none at all. I am not against these odd commons, but urge being responsibly mindful.

My husband and I have been making constant attempts to create an awareness, more often being ridiculed to be annoying than anything. Like, we plunge into awkward situations when a guest visits us and looks around for a waste bin to discard rubbish. We persuade them to hand it over to us, so we can discard them appropriately. We don’t blurt out why, but will be more than glad if they handed it over to us for disposal. Then there are some smart chaps who insist they’ll throw, because they’ve been taught to be mannered. So we accompany them, fingering them to the right bin. Amused to a point we don’t get it, they often burst into fits of laughter on learning we do effective 'waste management'. Many can’t see why, because they assert that in the end all goes to a single landfill, which isn’t entirely true. It gets hard on us to explain, but we try. We’ve come to a point where we’ve stopped giving answers to many, because they deliberately argue. So we silently follow the practice between ourselves.

Then on another anecdote, we were on an overnight train along with big group of families travelling collectively, our co-passengers for this journey. The head of that group, a physics professor to a college picked up casual conversations with us as we exchanged smiles, little talks and shared food with him and his family. And like it usually happens with most Indian families on a train journey, exchange of home cooked food become the pot-boilers to fuel conversations and controversies, this journey wasn’t any different. What although was nastily upsetting was that all through the course of this journey, this learned gentleman, his wife and their grown up teens, callously flung stuffs off the train window; the food, peels, plastics and all that at regular intervals. In midst of our talks, deliberating them to refrain from doing so, and giving them a dose of science behind the whys in idioms that the professor’s nasty brain could understand, couple of more garbage flew out in seconds! At the heights of it, well at the end of our meal, we pulled out our home-brought reusable polythene covers to pump in the wastes and dispose off sensibly later. As we were about to shove them into our bags, this smart gentleman in his wrecked wits grabbed our wastes and flung them off the windows, leaving us painfully distressed! Between his naughty grins, the supposedly science professor told us bluntly that all we had spoken were noble to preach and not to follow in reality. So we were in loss of words.

Awareness is elementary. But then, that’s not where the issue is. Most of us know consciously the value of nature and the repercussions we may face if we continue to exploit the resources this way. My uneducated house help is equally aware that wasting water is sinful since she purchases tankers of them for her survival. I wonder if she’s cautious at her place to care for every little drop that she pays for. Yet, when at work, it seems easier to let the tap flowing while cleaning vessels, because it saves her time and energy, and it costs no penny. Likewise, despite our several attempts to convey waste segregation messages within our apartment association, we’ve been least successful in getting most of the cultured folks in our vicinity to even make a beginning.

I second the fact that the reckless rate at which we are speeding up technologically is alarming. I feel like a perpetrator myself on several occasions. The cell phone era that we can’t do without, every ring, every call I make alarms me of their signal posts towering sky high at couple of foot steps and their carcinogenic radiations that we have to live with. Those Bluetooth, wireless, infra-reds and microwaves have become an indispensable part of our lives that we’ll be severely hampered without. The humongous bore wells being dug every single day, the failing rains and battling water problems in city that have made the bare essentials a commodity of sale, a free right the nature gave us, but with a responsibility that we’ve failed severely at.

The truth is I feel so unprepared for the future I see for my daughter. I see myself swinging on odd ends of balances. Blame it on motherhood, aging or the PMS, but I’ve been thinking a lot for a long time, of the ugly carbon footprint, my daughter, her future and all of that. I am left with cold nerves and numb feet of what holds in couple of decades from now. And if our Hindu discourses said we are in the kali yuga, I can’t help but reflect how right they were in their predictions. They did foresee what devastation human intelligence and greed could do. It’s only a hope we came together collectively and did our bit. For the environment. To save the future. And to let the future generation live. For our children and for theirs to come. And for our own old age.

All said with heavy thoughts, I wouldn’t want to leave you without a recipe of this salad that's apt for this summer, a recipe that’s simple and least complicated as my contemplations are. I leave you with a hope that you’ll ponder. And be the one who’ll resort to a positive change that will prolong the deleterious impact, hopefully. Hope you have a great weekend!

Baby Spinach, Apple & Walnut Salad with Raw Mango Dressing

INGREDIENTS

A bunch of baby spinach (from our home garden)
1 cucumber, cut to thin slices
1 Apple sliced to thin wedges
Couple of walnuts

For the Raw Mango Dressing:

1/2 cup grated raw mango
1 tbsp. oil
1 tsp. mustard seeds
1 tsp. turmeric powder
1 tsp. red chilli powder
Salt to taste

DIRECTIONS

Layer the cucumbers, followed by the apple slices and the baby spinach. Strew a couple of walnuts.

In a pan, heat the vegetable oil along with the mustard seeds. As the seeds begin to splutter, add the grated raw mango along with turmeric powder and sauté till it wilts and cooks through. This will take a couple of minutes. Add the red chilli powder and salt to taste. If you plan to store this dressing for a couple of days, then use more oil to cook mangoes. The oil needs to coat and cover them well. This simple mango chutney goes very well with rice and rotis.

Toss the salad with this prepared mango dressing or serve as a side along with this relish.

Daily Breads is one place in Bangalore where you get amazing salads (atleast I haven't seen any other joints offering salads) where we get to make our choice of ingredients. Select what you want and they make it for you. I have been missing them from the time we moved. I always wanted to make them at home the similar way, so that I don't miss them.

Weekdays are getting hectic and cooking a dinner sometimes does get tiring. Salads are helping me make my cooking easy. Sometime these salads can be so complete that they substitute our dinners. This is one such evening where it was not just the coleslaw, but a lot more added to it to make it nutritious and healthy and moreover complete our meal. Fruits and vegetables all brought together, this is coleslaw with apple potato penne salad. This salad goes well with any lunch or dinner or as is. It's perfectly filling and makes up for a good meal. I no longer miss Daily Breads.

Coleslaw with Apple Potato Penne Salad

INGREDIENTS

1/2 cup finely shredded cabbage
1/2 shredded lettuce leaves
1 apple chopped to cubes
1/2 cup potato, boiled and chopped to cubes
1/2 tomatoes, chopped
1/2 cup penne pasta
4 tbsp mayonnaise
4 tbsp sour cream/ yogurt
Few crisp toasted and broken bread pieces
Salt and pepper to taste
Few parsley leaves torn roughly

DIRECTIONS

Boil penne pasta as per the instructions given on the pack. Toast the bread pieces till crisp and break them to bite sized pieces. Add these to all the rest of the ingredients. Beat yogurt with mayonnaise and add to the above. Garnish with fresh torn parsley and serve.