Oh, wow...that salad I made up in my head earlier this week? It was good.
I made a dressing in the food processor using:
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 T sugar
juice of 1 lime
2 teaspoons fresh ginger
2 T sesame oil
fish sauce to taste -- around 1/8 cup
some tiny fresh red chiles
warm water to thin to desired consistency
garlic would have been good but we were out
I marinated some chicken breasts in lime juice, salt, and vermouth, and I grilled them and sliced them. Then I cut up watermelon into bite-sized wedges and thinly sliced some red onions. I used mixed greens from the grocery store, and Lawson picked some Thai basil. The chicken was fine and a little bland, nothing fancy, but the watermelon, basil, and spicy peanut dressing really worked.
The red onions are from the farm of my friend Ken's brother. Ken and Melanie brought them to us yesterday, and they are so beautiful -- very small, and almost luminescent.
3 comments:
I feel good just reading about this--my mouth is watering.
Yet again, you have rendered me drooling and feeling woefully incompetent as a cook and eater. Thank you!
Eva, I am going to do something pedantic. I am going to quote Robert Frost, and at length too:
"Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more available in the wild free ways of wit and art. A school boy may be defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic."
The moral? This bit of cooking falls under the second & better heading: "the wild free ways of wit and art." A new order of things. Maybe only someone without watermelon in her deepest memories could summon up so delightful a recombination. Me? I know how to plug a melon & how to put salt on it. That's the length of my (Georgia-born) gamut.
So, can you export this dish to Japan? And I mean in fact, not in recipe--'cause I am like the schoolboy when it comes to cooking: rote.
Anyway, next time I breeze through S.C. when the melons are in season;--well, I'll be making my requests.
By the way, I saw two perfectly cube-shaped watermelons in a store in Kyoto the other day. Apparently the farmer grew them in plexi-glass boxes.
Yours, Mark (the one in Kyoto)
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