This morning, I stepped outside and, for one shining moment, my skin experienced an ephemeral shiver. It wasn’t exactly cold out — more like the mid-70s — but as a refreshing breeze blew my way, I felt that tiny chill, and I said to myself three of my favorite words: Fall is coming.
I know, I know. Autumn is still technically a month away. And here in the Mid-Atlantic, by the time you read this we’ll be back into the mid-90s. But I caught a whiff of the season to come — my favorite season, hands down — and started dreaming of the foods that will be back on my table once the shorts go back in storage and the jackets come out.
As a gardener, I’m usually looking ahead, anyhow, thinking about what plants can thrive after they germinate and sprout in a few weeks, and I start to plan my cooking around them. When you live someplace that gets this hot in the summers (more and more of the world as the planet warms), one of the great seasonal cooking ironies is that at just the moment you are most interested in eating salads, it’s the absolute hardest to grow salad greens. My lettuces bolted and turned bitter a month ago, but I’m eyeing the calendar for the right time to start sowing new rounds of lettuce, spinach and arugula seeds for a fall bounty.
Until then, of course, I buy greens at the supermarket, and have been making salads that get heartier by the week. One I can’t stop making is from the inimitable Jeanine Donofrio’s latest book, “Love & Lemons Simple Feel Good Food.” It combines spinach with roast broccoli, apple (or pear), pumpkin seeds and dates, drizzled in an excellent curry vinaigrette. The dressing, punchy with garlic and ginger and curry powder, gets a touch of sweetness from more dates, and makes the salad as appropriate for special occasions as for any given weeknight. One of the (many) times I’ve made it was when I was looking for something to serve alongside a big pot of lentil soup for a colleague’s recent going-away celebration, and it worked wonders.
Broccoli and spinach feel like seasonless ingredients, but the apple — while available any time — clues you in to the idea that this salad might be particularly welcome in not only the season we’re in, but the one that’s on the horizon, ready to give you the chills you’ve craved all summer long.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/08/20/broccoli-salad-jeanine-donofrio-love-and-lemons/