11/10/08
Also
I have lost the ability to make salad dressing. I pour the oil. I salt and pepper. I pour the lemon juice. And then my salad tastes like the sourest grape in existance. Actually, it just tastes like it's been washed in lemon. wtf?
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9 comments:
Would may be adding some balsamic vinegar help?
But doesn't that make a balsamic viniagrette, not a lemon viniagrette? Or is there no such thing as a lemon viniagrette, and I'm just imagining it?
I'm sure the internet could tell me. This is just a ploy to get everyone to tell me their salad dressing recipes for this salad-free country.
Maybe this country only allows for mayo or sour cream-based recipes. Maybe Evgeny could enlighten me...
I don't think there's such a thing as lemon vinaigrette... Hell, if it were me, I'd forgo lemon juice altogether and just use balsamic vinegar and high quality olive oil, adding may be some basil in addition to salt and pepper. Or actually what I'd do is go to Azbuka Vkusa and splurge on a nice pre-packaged salad dressing :). They gotta have some!
But isn't salad dressing the one thing you should be able to make yourself?
Where my culinary boyz at?
I'm not sure where you got that assumption... I think it's much easier to fuck up salad dressing than, for example, scrambled eggs.
One think you SHOULD be able make yourself is a mayonnaise dressing (step 1: open jar of mayo; step 2: use large spoon to dollop mayo on salad; step 3: enjoy the deliciousness), but that, apparently, is not good enough for you :).
Sorry for the delay. I was busy making out with... I mean thoughtfully responding to Evgeny.
Gote, The mayo recipe offered by kg works in a pinch. I recommend the "French" style mayo from Calve, if you are going to go that route.
Otherwise, I think your problem is with the lemons you get in Moscow. Either they are picked way too early, or they're half-rotten, or they're just some other weird species that doesn't taste right to American tongues. An Abkhazian acquaintance was once telling me about her native land. She looked to her daughter and said, "Do you remember the oranges? The citrus?" This should tell you something.
Rather, you should focus on what Russia is good for: honey and mustard. This was my usual dressing: two heaping tablespoons of honey (of your choice), one heaping tablespoon of old Uncle Vanya's magic, a splash of balsamic, a drizzle of oil. Stir until thoroughly mixed (make sure the honey isn't cold, otherwise you'll just get little honey chunks in the mix--you may need to warm the honey a bit for mixing). Add salt, pepper and crushed garlic to taste. I would typically pour this over tomatoes, cukes, dill, and a few slices of fried kolbasa. My pet name for this dish was "uzhin." If I made a lot, this dish transformed into "uzhin s obedikom."
If this variant is too sweet (which it may be if not cut by the strength of a nice tasty kolbasichka), cut back on honey.
I was at the Sunset Park Greenmarket on Saturday, where the number of Russian shoppers has been exploding lately. One particular fellow was shopping with someone who apparently didn't have the get-up-and-go to leave the house that morning, but still wanted to be part of the process. At each stand he would hold up some intriguing new vegetable, enthusiastically ask the long-suffering 15-year-old Mexican farmer's daughter "And what is thee-us?"
"Uh, cilantro."
Into the phone: "Cee-lan-tro!"
He rummaged through some bags of red-leaf lettuce, reporting his every move to the person at the other end of the line, then held up a bag of green boston lettuce. "And what is thee-us?"
"Lettuce."
"This is lettuce?" he demanded, holding the green boston in one hand, then dropping it to seize the red-leaf. "And this is lettuce too?!"
"Yeah. Lettuce."
Shouting into the phone, wondrous: "They're both lettuce!"
Lemon vinaigrette would probably blow his mind.
Lemon can be used in vinaigrette, and so too can vinegar, as implied by the word we have to describe this salad coating phenomenon. Personally, I like lemon tasting salads over vinegar tasting ones because I find it brings out the freshness of the lettuce a bit. That said, if your lemons are not fresh (and lets be honest here, how could they possibly be fresh if it's winter and you're living in Russia?), then your salad is not going to taste fresh. It's going to taste boo. Maybe you can score something decent at an expensive/high-import supermarket, but even then I'd be skeptical as there aren't too many places close to Russia, or even to any of its satellite nations, that have the temper-ament/-ature for lemon producing. (see bubble map http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2005lemon_and_lime.PNG. And are you really going to trust lemons grown outside of Beijing?) And so I'd suggest looking into what Buster suggests. You can try to keep lemon as your base, and mix in the mustard (a traditional French addition to any vinaigrette, regardless of lemon v. balsamic) and garlic to stifle the rottedness, and you can also use a raw egg, which is another French move, but in the end this might be a Darwin situation where vinegar has simply won out.
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