Friday night excitement

Mixt Salads recipe #4: Field

I misplaced my camera. Not that Field was visually exciting, though it was quite pretty: a salad of pale butter lettuce with contrasting dark stripes of tarragon and a tiny bit of blue cheese. Nice and basic. Again, though, the proportions seemed off. I felt there was too much lettuce, too little cheese, too little oomph, that I have improvised more interesting green salads, that a handful of toasted nuts would have made a huge difference. Andrew Swallow calls for two heads of butter lettuce for four people. I bought one and maybe it was just an extraordinarily large butter lettuce, but we still had far too much. I can't quite get the hang of this book.

I served Field with veggie burgers made from The Frog Commissary Cookbook. These contained garbanzo beans, tahini, vegetables, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, wheat germ, and soy sauce and they were falafel-like and delicious, but again, too soft and crumbly. I'm going to try again and add more . . . more what? What would make these bind better? I share the aversion to using an egg, though I'm not sure why. I will try the recipes suggested by commenters. Thank-you.

After dinner, we watched a mesmerizing documentary on DVD called Sweetgrass about sheepherders in the mountains of Montana. Basically nothing happens and there's no talking but for occasional furious profanity directed at sheep. I highly recommend this movie, but please reread the first three words of the last sentence. I'm not exaggerating and wouldn't want anyone to be disappointed.

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