Unlikely Combinations: Savory Strawberry Salad

Spring means strawberry season. I had kind of forgotten about strawberries until they started popping up in grocery stores and on fruit stands on every block in the last few weeks. They’ve never been my favorite fruit, I think because of their fairly unexciting texture – I’m more likely to be pulled towards crispy apples or juicy nectarines – and the fact that when they aren’t perfectly ripe and sweet enough, their flavor has little going for it. I think what made me put down a bag of firm, shiny plums and pick up a box of strawberries yesterday was their stunning ruby-red color. And while texture and taste are undoubtedly important, I am certainly not the first person to point out that we also “eat with our eyes.”

My cooking is often driven by color, which can lead to some unlikely combinations. The problem with labeling anything an “unlikely combination” is that objectively speaking, no combinations are really that unlikely. Often, what seems incompatible or unusual turns out to be a classic flavor technique of another culture’s cuisine. Most Americans reserve cinnamon for sweet dishes like apple pies and French toast, but Middle Eastern cooks have mastered its use as a component of savory meat and vegetable dishes. If two things are edible, why not try putting them together? This philosophy seems sensible enough.

Anyway, these strawberries had such a vibrant color that I couldn’t resist mixing them with as many other colors as I could find in my kitchen. I decided to make a savory strawberry dish, which isn’t so uncommon – strawberry and spinach salad isn’t hard to find on menus these days. I wanted to use up a few ingredients I had in the fridge, so I started with some pre-cooked beluga lentils. This kind of lentil is tiny and jet black, with a shine reminiscent of caviar or polished pebbles. Against this glossy black background, I knew the strawberries would seem even brighter.

I mixed the lentils with some sautéed yellow onion and sliced almonds, then remembered I had some cooked spinach in the freezer and quickly microwaved and added it – red and green is the most classic example of color contrast. Finally I added in the chopped strawberry, salted and peppered the mixture, then splashed it with some balsamic vinegar. I dotted the top with clumps of immaculate white goat cheese. The bowl now represented a considerable range on the color spectrum.

And it tasted pretty good too. I realized that a lot of sub-groups of these ingredients are relatively straightforward: a berries-and-cream effect was achieved by adding the goat cheese, the balsamic vinegar with the lentils and almonds produced a satisfying earthy-plus-acid flavor combination. With all of it together there was a lot going on, needless to say, but overall, it worked. Next time I would add mint, for a refreshing herbal element.

Flapjacks

My mother never baked anything until several years after I moved out of the house. With the exception of a few school picnics for which she created some very damp meringues, her food production was limited to one-step “dishes” like grated carrots, frozen TV dinners, and toast. But for some reason, with both of her children away at college, she has become a mass-producer of all kinds of homemade jams, cakes, and ice creams.

When it comes to baked goods, my mother has mainly stuck to her English roots, with butter-infused recipes that my grandmother has always made expertly. But although my mother has come to embrace culinary projects with multiple steps and ingredients, she is still reluctant to actually follow recipes, even when they are right in front of her. This is why each batch of one of her signature dishes, oat cookies called flapjacks in England (nothing like the pancakes we Americans associate with that name), turns out radically differently.

Flapjacks are a bar cookie (although in England they’re “biscuits,” of course), typically made with rolled oats, butter, brown sugar, and sometimes a sticky binder like honey or golden syrup. Beyond that, people often add nuts, dried fruits, or chocolate, and they can be made crispier, stickier, or chewier depending on your preference. We tend to mix in whatever cereal needs to be finished, for a crunchier effect. If you cook like my mother, you can achieve all these effects in turn just by “following” a single recipe.

A word of warning: the combination of fat and sugar in these cookies creates a flavor that speaks to our evolutionarily encoded desire for, well, fat and sugar, and they can be so addictive that you find yourself totally incapable of not eating an entire plate of them. You start to feel like you have ingested a stick of butter (and you’re probably well on your way), but if there are more flapjacks in front of you, or even in a tin on the top shelf that’s meant for a party tomorrow, you simply can’t say no. I’ve seen it happen many times – my mother will offer around a plate of seemingly innocent oat bars, and suddenly people don’t know what’s happening to them. I call it Flapjack Madness.

My mother’s recipe follows, with my interpretation of her personal techniques in parentheses.

English Flapjacks

4 oz butter

2 oz rolled oats

2 oz. self-raising flour (my mother uses pancake mix)

4 oz. brown sugar

1 tbsp. molasses or golden syrup

3 oz. any kind of crushed corn flakes or cereal (whatever cereal people haven’t been eating fast enough)

2-3 oz. raisins and/or sultanas

2-3 oz. nuts (walnuts, almonds, pecans, hazelnuts) to taste

Melt the butter and mix with molasses and sugar. (Perhaps it doesn’t seem buttery enough. Add a few more tablespoons.) Stir in rest of ingredients. (Forget whether you’ve added the flour. It should be obvious, but somehow…it isn’t. Oh well, nothing wrong with them being extra buttery. Add some more cereal just in case; no one likes this kind for breakfast anyway.) Spread in greased square 9-inch pan. The trick is to spread it thinly enough to get crisp without disintegrating into crumbs. (But don’t worry about it too much, crumbs are still edible.)

Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes. (Or take them out when you suddenly remember you put them in before doing several loads of laundry, after you realize you have no idea what time you started anyway.) Score into squares about 5 minutes after taking out of the oven. (Observe results. Are they crunchy? syrupy? oozing with butter and golden syrup? Don’t dwell on how the choices you made on this particular occasion might have affected the outcome. Then you’d learn something to apply to the next batch, and that would make life less interesting. Just eat them.)

Places I've Been Meaning to Try: Kombit

I’ve often left restaurants with a to-go box filled with something too filling to finish in one sitting but too delicious to leave behind. Last night was the first time I’ve left a restaurant with a raw specimen of the main ingredient of a dish I’d ordered, and instructions on how to prepare it. But this gift was only one of the many delights that comprised my dinner at Kombit, a Haitian restaurant in Prospect Heights.

Kombit is just a few doors down from my apartment, and for months I’d been passing it and occasionally stopping to look at the menu to attempt pronunciation of the exotic Creole names, and to ponder ways to fit the Lambi (conch simmered in tomato) or Goat Tasso (fried chunks of marinated goat meat) into my starving-student budget. So when it came to choosing a place for a family dinner after my college graduation – it needed to be a place I had wanted to try out for a while, but one that was representative of the neighborhood and something that my parents (maybe) wouldn’t find at home in Berkeley – Kombit was the logical answer.

While waiting for our parents who were lagging behind, my sister and I decided to order drinks. Kombit has an impressive list of cocktails, but I chose a glass of Malta, a Carribean soda made of barley, hops, and water. I had heard it tasted like beer (which makes sense given the ingredients), but it reminded me of the instant Horlicks my mother used to make, with the creaminess of milk replaced by the refreshing zing of carbonation. My sister ordered Jus Corosol, made from the soursop fruit, which despite its name, as a waiter pointed out to us, is far from sour. It has a mildly sweet taste that seems to combine pineapple, guava, banana – basically every tropical fruit you can think of.

When it came to ordering, our waitress ascertained our unfamiliarity with the Haitian cuisine pretty quickly, and helpfully started constructing a meal for us according to our preferences. One question had to be answered first: “Are you hungry, or hungry-hungry?” Based on our responses, and taking my sister’s vegetarianism into account, we decided to start with Fritai Lakai (assorted fried root vegetables, including plantains and sweet potatoes), Akra, a traditional appetizer made of yautia, a staple root vegetable in West Indian cuisine, which is pureed and fried to resemble something like large tater tots. It is served with a spicy cabbage slaw whose freshness perfectly balances the decadent satisfaction of perfectly crisp-fried root vegetable.

The more we munched on the fritters, however, the more we wondered about the nature of the particular vegetable that composed them. The menu mentioned that yautia is also called “edo” on some islands in the West Indies, but neither name sounded familiar. We eventually asked our waitress if she could describe the vegetable, but she had a better plan: she reappeared from the kitchen a few moments later with a raw, unscrubbed yautia tuber rolling around on a small plate. She explained the tedious process of removing the tiny hairs that sprout from its thin dark brown skin, and how to make the white flesh into a pulp in a food processor. It sounded like quite an undertaking. “We like to say that a lot of love goes into Haitian cooking,” she said, “but it’s a lot of work.”

The tuber was placed off to the side when our main dishes arrived: Legume San Viand (stewed vegetables with rice and beans), Legume Bef (vegetables with beef, rice, and beans) and Rara salad (beets, corn, and other vegetables in a creamy dressing). Once again our waitress was on hand to demonstrate the best way to eat rice and beans: make a flat bead of rice on your plate, scoop some stewed vegetables on top, and spoon bean puree over the whole thing. Make sure to get some of each component on each forkful. This is an excellent method in my book, but the stew was delicious on its own, too – its subtle spice and the way the flavors of the cabbage, carrots, and lima beans had melted together was obviously a product of slow and laborious Haitian-style cooking.

As we left the restaurant, I was ready to book a flight to any tropical country where I could sip Jus Corosol and enjoy a slower pace of life, and of course the effects this has on cooking. But knowing that this was probably not going to happen, I was comforted by the bag in my hand, full of leftover plantains and the raw yautia, waiting to be cooked with the container of spice mix that our waitress had generously included. Plus, while the West Indies are a little far, Kombit is still down the street, and I have to go back to try the Goat Tasso.