Citrus and Olive Salad/Slaw

Citrus and olive salad with cabbage and carrots, and Mexican salsa verde.

This recipe’s parents are two recipes from Salt Fat Acid Heat: orange and olive salad, and Mexican-ish salsa verde. It’s not an exact combination of the two, but I drew inspiration from them to create this very flavorful, crisp, refreshing salad.

Start by sectioning the citrus. I find this process to be a giant pain in the ass, but it is necessary so that you don’t have any membranes in your salad. For citrus, you can really use any combination: blood oranges, grapefruit, sumo citrus, regular oranges…whatever you have in the fridge that day. Combine your citrus with halved Kalamata olives (I suspect green olives would work too, but I haven’t given this a try). I probably used 3-4 oranges/grapefruits and a half cup of the olives. Adjust to your liking, though. Add in julienned cabbage–roughly 1/2 head–and one julienned carrot. You could shred the carrot, too, if you prefer.

For the dressing, mince 3 tbsp shallots and one jalapeno pepper (seeded) and let macerate for about 15 minutes in a bowl with the juice of two limes. In a separate bowl, combine 1/4 c chopped cilantro, 1/4 c neutral oil (like grapeseed), salt to taste. Spoon out the shallots and jalapeno into the oil/cilantro combination, and taste for acid. If it needs more acid, add the lime juice little by little until it tastes right to you.

Combine the dressing with the orange/olive/cabbage mixture. Let sit for 5 minutes or so, then eat! This salad goes really nicely with fried chicken, conveyor belt chicken, citrus braised chicken, or slow-roasted citrus salmon.

Leftovers: Quinoa salad and salsa verde combined to make a refreshing spinach salad

We spent Passover at Kenny’s parents’ house this year (yay to vaccinated grandparents!) and our departure home with pounds and pounds of leftovers has become a Passover tradition to rival the singing of Dayenu. We will never, however, say “dayenu” to the leftovers–they are always welcome!

One of the leftovers we packed home was a quinoa salad with finely diced apples, raisins, zucchini, and cucumbers. It had a dressing on it, but it was so light that I didn’t worry about it competing with whatever I was about to do to it. For dinner last night, we didn’t have quite enough for two servings (the kids won’t touch quinoa), so I mixed it with baby spinach. It was pretty and looked very healthy and texturally interesting. I think I also added toasted crushed coriander seed, because I add that to everything now. It would also be fine without it, though.

As for dressing, we had some leftover salsa verde (acid: lime juice; fat: grapeseed oil; shallots and parsley, Morton’s kosher salt to taste), which I made into a dressing by adding a few teaspoons of Dijon mustard, a splash of white wine vinegar and some more oil just to bring up the volume of ingredients (I started with about 2 tbsp of the salsa verde). The result was a light and refreshing spinach salad with great texture added by the quinoa and diced veggies.

UPDATE: We had some of this frankensalad leftover after dinner, so for lunch the next day I added a chopped 9 minute egg and a spoonful or two of tahini from our local Chutzpah Kitchen and it was a filling, delicious, one-bowl lunch!