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Recipe: chopped greek salad

I’m feeling so much better now! Thank you for all of your kind wishes. I have to say, when I have a cold the foods that comfort and heal me most are: 1) Mom’s congee made with homemade broth, chicken, ginger, and green onions 2) Mom’s ginger-brown sugar tea and 3) Mom’s sweet fermented rice soup (jou nian – I call it boozy sweet rice). I always forget about these goto “feel better when sick” foods until I talk to my mom. So there I was, croaky voice sitting on the couch telling my mom that I’m slowly improving when she rattled off the foods I should be eating. I think just hearing her say it in Chinese made me feel that much more improved. When I was little, the only thing that made me feel better was having my mom or Grandma (boy, I was *spoiled*) pick me up and hold me. I was notorious for standing with my outstretched arms and saying, “bao bao?”

I haven’t taken a photo in a week, which feels like a lifetime to me! Trust me – that’s my one week this year without photos because from here on out it is going to be busy. *straps on helmet, tightens laces*

The recipe today is one I made before our trip to southwestern Colorado. I was in a salad state of mind because the heat makes me want to eat things like a cold giant hunk of watermelon or a bowl of grapes or ten popsicles for dinner. After I had made the chopped shrimp waldorf salad my eyes wandered to the previous page in my Fine Cooking issue… chopped Greek salad. Can do. Can do.

Salads in summer make me happy because they usually involve chopping (I love my knives and I love to use them) and minimal cooking if any. In this case, the croutons require a bit of stove and oven time. I highly recommend making your own croutons if you’ve never tried. I can think of very few foods in this world that are better store-bought than made (properly) at home.

[Crouton tangent] We made tons of homemade croutons when I was in Chile for field work as a graduate student. The bread we bought was barely passable right from the store – forget about 5 days out in the bleeping desert! All we needed was oil, garlic, salt, and stale bread cubes. Those were both good and bad times for me (particularly the time when I said, “I’m sure that ham is still good – give it here.”) The one person who really made my entire field season tolerable was my “field assistant”, friend, and fellow grad student, Greg. I put field assistant in quotes because HE taught ME about geomorphology and we worked really well together in the field. Greg saved me from going batshit as we dealt with all manner of interesting obstacles like land mines, equipment issues, logistics, rethinking the science, 8.0 earthquakes, navigating over roadless terrain in thick fog on top of a cliff that plunged 3000 feet to the ocean, and so much more.