Cooking
Melissa Clark’s five-star summer stunner hits all the necessary notes: savory, sour, salty, sweet, spicy, fresh and funky.
It’s probably not a good idea to tell millions of people how to trap me, but I can’t resist anything with lime, chiles and herbs on it. That trio is a perfect combination of flavors and textures — sour, juicy lime; spicy, crisp chiles; green, leafy herbs — that enlivens pretty much whatever you pile it on. Rice noodles. Chicken breasts. Vegetables of all kinds and colors, whether raw, grilled, blanched or roasted.
Not that making Melissa Clark’s grilled salmon salad requires any persuading; the supple fish and crisp lettuces would be good dressed with lots of things. (I’ll leave this green goddess recipe right here.) But that lime, chile and herb combo, boosted and balanced with a little fish sauce and sugar, is particularly punchy and lip-smackingly assertive. The reader notes on this five-star recipe are full of great suggestions: Add radishes, cucumbers or oranges; swap in leftover cooked chicken for the salmon; shower everything with crispy fried shallots.
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Grilled Salmon Salad With Lime, Chiles and Herbs
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Yewande Komolafe’s quick ginger chicken with crisp napa salad also nails that acidic-spicy-herbal trifecta. The acidic element here is rice vinegar (and lime!), the spice kick comes from ginger and a bit of cayenne, and mint and cilantro keep things fresh and herby. And I wouldn’t have guessed it before looking at the ingredient list, but this German potato salad, a “Joy of Cooking” classic adapted by Suzanne Hamlin, also gets some balance and kick from cider vinegar, dry mustard and celery leaves (which, for my purposes here, I’m counting as herbs).
Two more recipes that got Scooby-Doo reactions from me: Sue Li’s smashed cabbage and mushroom burgers, which caught me with Sue’s note that the crunchy, slightly meaty texture of the patties is inspired by okonomiyaki. And then there’s Ham El-Waylly’s gorgeous grated tomato pasta, which beckons all those bruised tomatoes I scoop up from the discount tables at my farmers’ market.
I’ve been on a big berries ‘n’ cream kick lately — I blame Wimbledon — tumbling handfuls of berries and a greedy drizzle of honey on Greek yogurt as my nightly dessert. With a little extra planning (and some cardamom and confectioners’ sugar), I can have Tejal Rao’s shrikhand, or sweet strained yogurt. The planning part is easy enough; I just need to drain my yogurt in the fridge overnight to turn it thick and supercreamy. Then in goes the cardamom, sugar, pistachios and saffron, though I still might top my shrikhand with berries. Or, better yet, sliced mango.