what's for dinner?

january 98

When winter sets in with vengeance, we change our salads from light and cool recipes to whet the flagging summer appetite to more substantial offerings, often with a warm dressing to keep the cold weather at bay. With today's hot houses and overnight air-freight delivery, we are no longer restricted to just winter fruits and vegetables. If we're willing to pay the price, we can serve luscious raspberries and a perfectly ripe peach or tomato when a winter blizzard is raging outside. Like other working women, we're always looking for ways to cut the time we spend in the kitchen. We find ready-to-use salad greens and vegetables well worth the extra expense. This is particularly true of the bags of already-peeled baby carrots. The finger-sized carrots are particularly sweet and excellent when tossed while still warm with a bistro-style dressing made with shallots and chopped fresh chervil (both are indispensable herbs in our kitchens) for a quick, tasty salad. We grow chervil from seed in indoor pots in a sunny window during the winter months so that we can have plenty of the dainty, feathery leaves to sprinkle over salads. With its slight anise flavor, chervil adds a much tastier finish to the salad than parsley. Chervil is also available in the fresh herb section of your supermarket. Don't bother using dried chervil; it has virtually no taste, and you're better off using parsley. Baby Carrot Salad, Bistro Style Our second recipe is an interesting version of the classic American Waldorf apple salad, tossed with an orange-scented dressing that's sure to please your family. You could also make this salad with chopped crisp red Bartlett pears instead of the apples. Apple and Celery Salad with Orange-Scented Dressing We love fresh fennel (sometimes called anise, Florence fennel, or finocchio). Here we've teamed fennel with oranges for a salad that bursts of Mediterranean flavor. Close you eyes when you take your first bite, and imagine you're dining in an elegant little restaurant on Quai des Deux-Emmanuel set along the port of Nice off the road to Monaco. Fennel and Orange Salad If you're not familiar with jicama, you should be. Sometimes called the Mexican potato, jicama is a large bulbous root vegetable with a thin brown skin and a crisp white flesh that's becoming more readily available and popular throughout the country. If the jicama at the market is too large, ask a produce person to cut the jicama in half. They'll gladly do so, shrink- wrapping both halves (many markets already do this as standard practice as the bulbs tend to be quite large). Here we've made a slaw of julienned jicama and grated carrot, tossed with a dressing made with malt vinegar. We keep malt vinegar, a mild vinegar made from malted barley, in our pantry; but you can use a fruity apple cider vinegar with good results. Once you tried this recipe, you'll be making this salad often. This slaw is quite yummy and totally fat-free! Jicama and Carrot Slaw For our final winter salad, we're offering a lightened version of a fresh beet salad that Frances developed years ago when she co-authored Kitchen Herbs (Bantam Books). The twist here is that the beets are in boiling water for only a minute or so, until you can slip off their skins, so this is essentially a raw beet salad. Served on a bed of baby greens, the beets are topped with crème fraîche flavored with fresh tarragon (a delightful herb with beets) and a smidgeon of raspberry vinegar. If you haven't already printed off our recipe for crème fraîche, you may want to do so now and file it among your favorite recipes as we will be calling for this item again and again. You'll find it in the Broiled Bananas with Crème Fraîche in the November Planned-Overs (Day 1). We always have a container of crème fraîche in our fridge to use on salads, desserts, vegetables, soups, etc. A batch will keep for about a week, but we seem to use it up before it goes bad. Beet Salad with Tarragon Crème Fraîche (for the recipes, click on The Recipes or click on the individual recipe above)