Mediterranean Salad

Mediterranean Salad

Presenting the Mediterranean Salad. We ate it for brunch this Sunday morning. This whim, plus my grandmother's recipe for hummus, made our day. 

It took some time to figure out what salad we wanted. So we googled it. We googled Mediterranean salad. We googled cucumber salad. We googled cucumber parsley salad. (We have TONS of parsley we needed to use.) We could not find what we envisioned. 

So I made it. 

It serves two -- very intimate. Here is the refreshing, glorious recipe. I mean, just look at it. (This is probably the most refreshing thing you'll ever eat, so listen up.)

SALAD:

1 cucumber, peeled and diced

1 large tomato, diced

1/4 onion, diced

1/2 cup parsley, chopped

1 tsp. RealSalt  

Toss the salad, and serve with hummus, the recipe of which follows. 

HUMMUS ba Tahini:

2 cans garbanzo beans

1/3 cup olive oil

1/3 cup warm water

juice of 3 lemons

1/2 cup tahini

3-4 garlic cloves (pressed before)

1 1/2 tsp. salt

2 tsp. cumin, ground

pepper to taste

This makes quite a lot of hummus, but it's always gone within a few days at my house. I found this recipe on a scrap piece of paper in my grandmother's Joy of Cooking. It is the best hummus recipe I have ever made, so please enjoy! 

Snowy Day Snow Cone

Snow Flakes

by Emily Dickinson

I counted till they danced so
Their slippers leaped the town,
And then I took a pencil
To note the rebels down.
And then they grew so jolly
I did resign the prig,
And ten of my once stately toes

Are marshalled for a jig!

This recipe calls for fresh snow, which we don't get in Texas too often. Luckily (or perhaps not so luckily, because all our pipes froze) it got ridiculously cold here for days and days and days, and then it snowed.

Mostly people want snow cones in the summer, so they stand in long, long lines in the hot sun for that cup of mashed up ice with sweet, colored juice squirted on it. Then of course, one must gobble up the snow cone as fast as possible, or it will become a cone full of strangely-flavored water, which for some reason is not as appetizing.

But real snow comes down from snowy clouds, and if the ground is cold enough, as it was here some weeks ago, it stays on the ground and every surface in sight, and you harvest it and eat it. 

The uncivilized way to eat snow is to scoop it up in mittened hands and eat it right then and there. Or, one could pack it into an elegant glass and color the top with several drops of chlorophyll.

Here is the recipe. 

Recipe for Natural, Natural Snow Cones

(All organic)

Ingredients:

Snow

Chlorophyll

Directions:

Wait for about two weeks of super cold weather, then snow flurries, then when you wake up in the morning and the world is all white and beautiful, get your equipment and get outside before it melts. Gather as much as possible of clean snow. Distribute it carefully into elegant glasses, administer several drops of chlorophyll to the snow, and serve immediately.