RECIPE: Chicken Salad with Grapes and Walnuts

We have fallen in love with this chicken salad recipe, which makes me a little nervous because why, oh why can't we ever fall in love with carrot sticks? Or more to the point, why can't we ever fall in love with carrot sticks without a delicious homemade buttermilk ranch dip, the kind with two cloves of garlic and some fresh dill?

It just isn't in us.

Anyway, this isn't one of the best food pictures I've ever taken, mostly because of the bread. This chicken salad is much better served on croissants, ditto homemade, with or without the fresh dill. It's also better with homemade mayonnaise or Hellmann's scooped creamily from the jar and stirred in but I have made a concession to the health of our hearts and "light" mayonnaise can be used. If you must. And you should! But just between you, me and the enduring spirit of Julia Child, it's going to be better if nothing "light" in mayonnaise form cozies up to those trusting grapes and walnuts and chicken chunks.

This can also be served in a scoop on a bed of curly leaf lettuce with some pretty grapes and a little slice of soda bread or zucchini bread or some champagne crackers in a retro ladies-who-lunch presentation, or on a ripe tomato still warm from the garden. If you elect to eat the tomato slurping over your kitchen sink and shoveling in a bite of chicken salad out of the bowl you made it in, I will never tell. It is that good.

Here's a major thing with this salad, though: you have to dice all the chunky ingredients very finely, because if you don't, this salad just becomes impossible to eat -- you can't get a bite that includes everything at the same time if you have big hunks of chicken, big hunks of grape, big ol' honkin pieces of celery, whole walnuts, et cetera. It looks better if it's in the huge chunks, but it eats better cut up small.

CHICKEN SALAD WITH GRAPES AND WALNUTS

INGREDIENTS:

4 cups cooked chicken, diced very small

1 cup of LIGHT MAYONNAISE IF YOU REALLY FEEL YOU HAVE TO

4 T sour cream (okay, this can be "light" too...)

1 cup seedless red grapes, cut in half, or in thirds if they're large

6 green onions, including the green stems, diced very small

2 ribs celery, diced small

1 cup chopped walnuts

3/4 teaspoon salt

several dashes black pepper

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 tablespoon honey

DIRECTIONS:

Carefully stir all ingredients together in a large mixing bowl and allow to chill for two or three hours. Serving size is approximately one-half cup.

RECIPE: Summer Potato Salad

This potato salad recipe came to me through my friend Julie's mother-in-law, Connie. I don't know if Connie invented it or whether she found it somewhere herself. All I know is that whenever it showed up at a Fourth of July pitch-in or a 500 Race Day Party or someone's graduation open house, it started off looking like something ready for a magazine photo shoot with a sprig of dill and a cherry tomato on top in a Dutch blue serving bowl and forty minutes later, looked like a sprig of dill and a battered cherry tomato in the bottom of an empty Dutch blue serving bowl that had potato salad remnants thinly smeared around the edge, where someone had taken their nasty finger to it.

It is really, really good. So cool, creamy and rich, with that piquant bit of dill and the tiniest little bite from the green onions. I hope you'll make it and enjoy it.

This recipe makes enough potato salad for my gang to enjoy at dinner for about four or five days, although it usually doesn't last that long because we end up dipping up a spoonful here and there for lunch.

INGREDIENTS:

four large potatoes OR six medium potatoes, peeled, cooked, diced and cooled

2 stalks celery, washed and diced

4 green onions, washed and diced

1 T dried dill OR 1/4 cup fresh dill

4 hard cooked eggs, shelled and chopped

one small can ripe olives, drained

salt

freshly ground pepper

Hellmann's Mayonnaise (regular sized jar) (use Hellmann's Lite if you must)

2 T prepared mustard


DIRECTIONS:

In a large mixing bowl, add potato chunks, celery, green onions, eggs, dill and olives. Add the mustard, then begin adding the mayonnaise about a half-cup at a time and stirring. Seriously, you're going to use about 3/4 of the jar. I know. But don't be scared. You're not going to eat this in ginormous bowlsful because it's very rich and now you know why.

Add the mayo until the potato mixture is creamy. You'll know when you get there because it will look absolutely delicious. Now you need to add the salt and it will take more salt that you ever thought possible, more salt than is contained in the entire Dead Sea, it seems. Anyway, I add it about a teaspoonful at a time, stir, and taste. Keep that up until it has achieved the level of saltiness that you prefer. Then add some grinds of black pepper.

Additional Ingredients:

You can thinly slice about three radishes and add to this if you'd like some extra bite. The radishes seem to balance the buttery richness of the ripe olives very nicely. Plus, they add a cheerful little burst of color. Don't make the slices too thick, though, because they interfere with the salad's texture with a little too much crunch.

You can substitute capers for the ripe olives if you'd like, but then you have to call the green onions "scallions" instead of green onions and you have to broadly hint to whoever eats the salad that you made the mayonnaise yourself. And that you personally went to Idaho to select the potatoes, peeling them with a titanium veg peeler with a counterweighted grip that was uniquely conformed to the shape of your hand by a master kitchen tool artisan in Quebec.

RECIPE: Egg Salad

One of our favorite lunches on Fridays during Lent is egg salad. This is one of those beloved comfort foods, for me dating back to my college days at Ball State. My friend Jennifer and I would lug all our books down to the Dugout, a little cafe in the basement of Studebaker Hall where she lived and sit in a booth and study, eating egg salad sandwiches on white bread with glasses of the coldest milk ever. Dee-licious! Those were happy days, fondly remembered. Jen, who was worried back then that she'd fail out of the BSN program for lack of being able to administer an injection into an orange, is now a nurse at a big hospital in Indianapolis. And I am, well, me.

I don't really have a recipe for this, so all amounts are approximate. If it isn't creamy enough for your liking, add another dollop of mayonnaise. If you prefer it less tart, cut back on the mustard. That's one of the great beauties of egg salad -- you can adjust the ingredients in various ways and still have a tasty final product. We've found that the only thing you can really add too much or too little of is salt.

Egg Salad

6 eggs, hard cooked and de-shellified

3/4 c. mayonnaise

2 T mustard + a couple of extra squirts

1/4 tsp celery seed (can substitute one stalk of diced celery)

1/2 tsp dried dill weed, crushed

salt to taste (eggs need a lot of salt, so add, stir and taste until you have it as you like it. Ha! I threw some Shakespeare in there!)

Optional ingredient: stir in about ten sliced green pimiento olives. Make sure to cut down on the salt you add if you choose this option


In a medium-sized mixing bowl, smoosh eggs with a fork. Or if you have one of those fancy chopper doo-dads like my mom does, use that instead. Add remaining ingredients, except for salt. Add salt in 1/8 teaspoon increments and stir, tasting after each addition.

Makes six nice sandwiches. Serve on toasted bread or on plain, soft white Wonder Bread. In the summer, however, this is also really good on a quartered ripe tomato.

RECIPE: Seven-Layer Salad

This is that famous vegetable salad (originally from Kraft Foods, I believe) made in the trifle dish and it is pure, delicious 1950s American kitsch. It is also really, really good. This is what "my husband" is making for the Mother's Day lunch at my parents' house tomorrow. I say "my husband" because I'm going to make the salad, of course. His job is carrying it triumphantly through my parents' front door, making it his salad. I'm sure he could make a Seven-Layer Salad if he wanted to, but he doesn't and I don't mind, so there you have it. Marital harmony and a tasty salad all being synergistic together.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Because I don't. I'd better just do the recipe.

SEVEN-LAYER SALAD

[Edited to add: after making this salad on Sunday morning, I have some revisions]


Salad

1 pound bacon, cooked and crumbled (preferably that peppered bacon)

1 bag romaine salad greens, washed and broken into pieces that can allow you to take a ladylike bite

1 large red onion, chopped

1 10-ounce bag frozen peas, thawed

1 package shredded sharp Cheddar cheese (or more if you like cheese)

2 cups cauliflower, washed and chopped in bite-sized pieces

Dressing

2 cups Hellmann's mayonnaise (you can use other brands, but this is the best-tasting in my opinion. Although my grandma often made her own from the Julia Child cookbook)

3 tablespoons white sugar

3/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese (once again, the kind in the green cylinder will do, but the taste is different - better - if you buy an actual hunk of Parmesan or use the coarsely-grated kind that comes in a little plastic container)

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Mix the dressing ingredients together in a small bowl and set aside.

Reserve a few bacon crumbles for the top of the salad.

Layer the salad in your trifle dish (if you're going for show) or wooden salad bowl (if you're cynically aware that it's just going to be all mixed together and eaten anyway) starting with the spinach leaves. Add the remaining ingredients in the following order: red onion, peas, cheese, cauliflower, bacon. Top with the dressing and garnish with bacon crumbles and a sprinkling of paprika, no matter how much your foodie cousin mocks you.

This will serve a goodly number of people if offered as a salad, that is to say, a side dish. It is also wonderful as a main summer meal, served with garlic bread. If that's the case, it will make six servings.