Lucky dip - two Italian salads
I'm feeling lazy today I'm afraid and so I went for the lucky dip option and picked my Women's Weekly Christmas book that we have done before. I nearly put it back but decided that that was chickening out. Besides I am unlikely to pick the same page - and of course I didn't.
This time I picked a page from their Italian Seafood Lunch theme on which there were two salads - char-grilled zucchini salad and orzo salad.
Which is sort of coincidental because I have just been given a whole lot of zucchini and I am always looking for new things to do with them. And I know I've written about that before, so I won't bang on about what you can do with zucchini again.
What is actually interesting about these two salad is how 'of the moment' they are. In every way.
The first thing to notice is how beautifully photographed it is. The whole book is superbly designed, but I've talked about that before. But this is an 'of the moment' thing isn't it? When did the profession of food stylist come into being? And specialist food photographers too. I'm guessing there would have been a team of around half a dozen people producing this finished product. Just for how it looks. Never mind the people who actually made it.
Note the stylishly, crumpled table mat, and the cutlery also somewhat in disarray. Here is how they suggest you do the cutlery for your place settings:
Gorgeous isn't it, and so, so, simple. Now why can't I think of things like that? I'm just so uninspired when it comes to decoration. As for the salad itself, that is really just thrown into the dish any old how, so I guess the thing here is to make sure you've got a nice dish. The salad itself is also typically modern and typically easy, easy, though there is a degree of chopping involved I guess. For the dressing that is - you simply slice and char-grill the zucchini. But you do need to chop some olives, anchovies and shallots, and grate some orange and lemon rind for the dressing. Now I wonder whether David would have found that difficult to throw together? He wouldn't have wanted to read the instructions I guess. It's also an example of something that you wouldn't necessarily have thought of yourself - the dressing that is. I guess it's a vinaigrette with the addition of those extra things and I know I wouldn't have thought of the combination, even though when I see it there on the page I can see that it's almost a deconstructed tapenade. And a touch more French than Italian to me.
Then there is the Orzo salad. In case you didn't know orzo is a kind of pasta that looks a bit like rice. Potentially slightly tricky to find, but it can be found. I'm not sure that the local supermarket has it but certainly the more specialised ones do. This salad has a pretty standard vinaigrette but made with lemon juice rather than vinegar. It's the mix of ingredients that is the thing here - orzo, parsley, mint, cherry tomatoes, red onion and feta. Well this is a mixture that would have been unheard of and amazingly exotic in my youth, but which these days is commonplace. Every foodie magazine and cookbook will have something similar in it. We probably all know that you can mix and match as well - bocconcini instead of feta, or goat's cheese. Different herbs, sun or oven dried tomatoes, a mix of tomatoes, different pasta - even rice - or even more trendily freekah or quinoa.
It's yet another indication of how far we have come. These two recipes are really not that exciting to us today are they? They are commonplace. Even McDonald's et al. serve similar kinds of things, and you can buy them ready made in your supermarket too.
And yet. There is always that lingering question, "I wonder what the poor people are eating?" Probably not zucchini or orzo salad. Indeed are they eating salad at all? The Australian Women's Weekly is an Australian institution and I'm sure the 'poor' buy their magazine or at least peruse them somehow, so you would think they have access to these things. And neither of those dishes, are expensive to make even though they look expensive. But I'm willing to bet they don't eat this kind of thing. Somebody should look into this.
