Marinated Vegetable Salad

Looking for a cool vegetable salad recipe that can make a bunch or just enough and keep for a while in the refrigerator?  This is it:  marinated vegetable salad.  I've made a gallon  for a wedding reception over in Gulf Shores, Alabama this weekend.  I'd provided the food for the bride's uncle's wedding several years ago.  In a little community like Leakesville, you grow up knowing everybody.  The father of the bride and his little brother were both in Mama's kindergarten;  their mother is a class mate of Brother #1, their uncle a class mate of Brother #3.  I'd line out all the other connections but it'd get confusing after a while.  You might be tempted to make a Southern joke.  The South doesn't need one more joke...

There's no specific recipe to this recipe.  I'll show you what all is in this salad, but use what you and your family likes.  It's quick to put together.  So quick I forgot to show you all the veggies draining in the colander.

Here are the ingredients for the vinaigrette:

Apple cider vinegar
White vinegar
Grapeseed oil
Vegetable oil
Celery seed
Dill weed
Garlic powder
Granulated sugar

There's a ratio for a sweet and sour vinaigrette:  equal amounts of sugar and vinegar and half as much oil as vinegar.  And whatever herbs and spices your taste buds are set on.  I like the bite of apple cider vinegar but there is such a thing as too much of it, so I use half white vinegar also.  I've also been enjoying lightening up olive oil recipes with grapeseed oil but it's kind of pricey and is used sparingly.  Celery seed and dill weed are always good in a salad but if you don't like them, don't use them, it's just that easy.

Put all the ingredients into a microwave safe bowl or measuring cup and microwave for three or four minutes.  Stir and microwave again another couple of minutes.  All you're doing is making sure the sugar is melted and incorporated.

I know.  This is where I stand to ladle jelly into jars.

You can see splatters of jelly all over the front of 

the microwave.  I should probably clean that

tomorrow.

In the meantime, open all your vegetables and put in a colander to drain.  Asparagus is delicious in this, but I didn't add it.  It's one of those acquired tastes that not everybody likes.  Water chestnuts give a nice crunch, even if they aren't real flavorful.  They're cut into thin strips to keep from having a mouthful of sort of tasteless crunchiness.

That's a sweet onion.  I'd forgotten green onions

so used what was on hand.  

MMMMmmmmm.  Wickles:  wickedly delicious pickles.

Or in this case wicked pepper strips.  They're a little

hot and a lot sweet.  More and more often they're 

getting added to salads right along with

homemade sweet pickles.

When the vinaigrette is finished and onions (to taste) are diced, all the well drained vegetables are placed in  a large container.  Add the vinaigrette.

Tadadaaaaa!  That's all there is to it!

Let it sit a couple of hours for the flavors to marry.

It's much better the next day and even MORE 

better several days later (please don't call

the Grammar Police).

After I'd put the salad all together I thought about transporting it Saturday and the amount of room the gallon jug would take up in the cooler and having to leave the precious jug with the clients and depend upon them to get it back to me.  The better thought was to put the salad  into a large ziplock bag in a baking dish.  Ziplock bags conform themselves around other things in coolers.  I won't feel sad about leaving a bag behind...

Y'all enjoy!

The Secret to Mayree's Chicken Salad: Home Made Mayo

This isn't your mama's or grannie's chicken salad (I bet theirs is good!).  It doesn't have eggs or dry mustard or grapes of any color or water chestnuts.  It's my chicken salad with chicken, finely diced celery, pickles, chopped roasted pecans and homemade mayonnaise. That's it, that's all there is to it.

I like to season the chicken very well so it tastes like chicken and not like tuna.  Have you ever eaten someone's chicken salad and thought it was tuna?  Tuna salad is fine but chicken salad that tastes like it is naaaasty.  Lots of folks down here keep all the ingredients except the meat the same between the two sandwich fillings...not something this limited palate enjoys.

Season the chicken with your favorite flavors.  Season it VERY well.

The Pig has boneless skinless chicken breasts on sale this week for $1.18 a pound!  This is one package, a little over five pounds.

I generously use all the seasonings in that photo up there to coat the chicken.  I do that in the sink, by the way.  I'm kinda sorta germophobic.  Chicken can be a major carrier of microbes.  I like to sanitize the sink with bleach before AND after using it.  I don't feel like I can get a container of any sort clean enough to kill all the cooties that might be present in it or on the chicken.  I season all the meats in a sanitized sink.  That's just me and Ben saying:  An ounce of precaution is worth a pound of cure.

Life is easier if you plow around the stumps.  Make it so:  line the pan.

Cover and bake however fast or slow you want to.  These are boneless skinless breasts, they'll bake quickly without getting tough.  I covered the chicken with foil and baked at 400 F. for forty minutes (or so).

My oven bakes 'slow,' meaning it's approximately 

twenty-five degrees cooler than the thermostat.

That's the chicken started.  Time to assemble everything else:

Lots of celery, Wickles (wickedly delicious pickles), 

and pecans (at least a cup).

Chop the pecans in your handy dandy pecan chopper like mine.

Put in something oven proof and throw in the oven to roast.

Finely dice celery.

This is four cups of diced celery.  There are no big honkin' chunks,

just delightful little explosive crunches of flavor and texture.

Drain and chop Wickles.  I'm out of home made sweet pickles or I'd use them.  Say no to sweet pickle relish.  It's just not the same.  It's better to not use any pickles at all than to confound the flavors with all that sweet syrupy mustard-seedy funky stuff.

 Wickles are sweet with a nice bite.  I didn't use any black pepper seasoning

the chicken because I knew I was using these.  I didn't use peppercorns

in the mayo for the same reason.  They're spicy!

That's a little more than one cup of diced Wickles.

Are you checking FB and texting and talking?  Did you check the chicken and pecans in the oven?  I did.  They're done.

It's mayonnaise time while these are cooling.

That's apple cider vinegar in the blue wine bottle.  When you're making mayo 

for salads I highly recommend it.  The flavor it gives to the mayo is incredible 

- for salads, that is.  I do not want a tomato sandwich 

made with it, come summer.

The ingredients are a cup of each kind of oil, a slim teaspoon of salt, a packed teaspoon of roasted garlic, 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar and two very small medium eggs.

You can make it with all one kind of oil but I like this half and half 

combination.  The the two medium eggs are very small.  It'd only take one of 

Perlena's Peculiar Hennie eggs.

I make it in the CuisinArt.  It's very easy!

Those are the eggs well processed and the apple cider vinegar

about to be added.

Vinegar is incorporated and roasted garlic and salt are next.

I like to use roasted garlic in it.  You can use fresh garlic to kick up the flavor

a couple of notches but dispose of it within a couple of days.  Fresh garlic has a low pH;

it doesn't keep well.

 Slowly....

 Sllllllowly....

Almost there!  Slowly...

Tadadaaaaa!

That's a little over two cups of home made roasted garlic mayo!

Watch!  I'm going to show you the secret to a wonderful texture for chicken for salad.

 Cut the chicken in chunks that will go through the feeder tube on you food processor.

 Turn the machine on...

 And let gravity do the rest!

 None of it is any thicker than 4 mm.  It's almost perfectly shredded!

 Add the pecans and chicken to celery and Wickles.

 Add mayo and stir to combine.  It's not a super creamy

kind of chicken salad.

 It's crunchy with celery and pecans.  The pecans are unexpected and, being roasted,

lend an incredible bent to the flavor.  And the apple cider vinegar will have you

looking for apples in it, too!

Y'all enjoy!

Tomato Gravy: Southern Ambrosia (and I don't mean that orange/coconut stuff either)

See the lumpy reddish gravy at 6:00 on the plate?  That's tomato gravy, not the prettiest I've made but the first made that the camera was remembered and the process photographed.

I like to think of it as Southern Ambrosia, food of the gods.  Or something very pleasing to taste and smell.  It's a fambly favorite with or without Christmas breakfast.

Christmas breakfast?  Yep.  Breakfast.  Twenty-four years ago Thanksgiving morning in a small one bedroom apartment on Mount Moriah Boulevard in Memphis, Tennessee I awoke to smell nothing.  No thing.  It was different, not having smells of anything cooking when holiday memories previously were infused with scents of deliciousness coming from the kitchen.  Most times the smells would hurl me out of bed and to the kitchen where Mama would welcome the help, ignoring the fact the middle pecan missing from the pie was concomitant with my arrival there.   Mama would put the turkey on the top rack early in the morning when the brothers were awakened to go deer hunting, sent out the door with biscuit and link sausage.  Pecan pies would follow fowl into the oven, squash or pumpkin pies took their turn following the nuts, then casseroles and dressing.  The kitchen was rich with love of fambly, the smells coming from it a happy byproduct.

That first Thanksgiving away from home was difficult to salvage.  I was so excited to finally be out of the Deep South - away from everything I knew.  It should have been cookies (notice I didn't say cake - I can do cake).   It should have been a grand adventure.  Except there were no smells to wake up to.  There was nothing cooking in the kitchen.  It was awful.  I was homesick.  Me!  Homesick!  A vow was made that it would never happen again.  It hasn't, either.  Christmas Breakfast was created.

Every Christmas Eve I'll put a ham in the oven to slow roast the entire night.  Years ago, about the time the babies were waking up the ham would be done.  Everybody knows youngsters don't sleep past five Christmas morning.  

This year's breakfast was a little lighter than previous ones although I did find yellow grits at the Pig.

There is always (I know - no such thing as always but really there always has been) tomato gravy, one of everyone's favorite food.  To make it you'll need:

tomatoes - these are home grown, home canned Marglobe tomatoes, two pints
1/2 cup oil or bacon grease
3/4 cup flour
sugar to taste
salt to taste

See the ham to the left and grits on the back right

burner? MMmmmm...

Put the oil and flour in the skillet and turn on medium heat.

 When there's lots of bacon to be cooked

I bake it in the oven.  It turns out

nice and flat and you don't have to 

stand there and fry it.

With the heat up like this it won't take but a few moments for the flour to brown.

 

Almost there...

Yep!  I hope you've opened the tomatoes already.  If you haven't, take the dark roux off the heat or else it's going to scorch and make a bitter mess of a gravy.

Add the tomatoes and stir.  It really won't take but two or three minutes for them to thicken.

Add salt to taste and sugar to taste.   Home canned tomatoes don't require much sugar to take the acidic edge off.  GranGranny liked anything made with tomatoes to be very sweet.  My fambly enjoys it without all the sweetness.  Add as little or none at all for your family.   I have a half-cup of sugar in the photo.  I actually sweetened the coffee with a shake of it, using probably 1/4 cup in the gravy.

Here you go.  Christmas breakfast.  

 Can you tell?  I like black pepper.  I learned

a long time ago not to add pepper to the pot

or no one else will be able to eat!

Don't keep tomato gravy in reserve just for Christmas.  Our fambly also enjoys breakfast for supper where it requires little more than a pan of biscuits.  Make breakfast for your bunch tonight!

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Since Christmas breakfast was actually on Friday this year so the Oldest Fellow could eat with us, I had Youngest Fellow run to the Pig and pick up a pack of bacon for our REAL Christmas day breakfast, which I put in the oven on warm.  It baked perfectly.   I wasn't waking up on Christmas day without smelling anything - not even in my own house!