Chopped Salad...à la Franco-Californienne

Many of you are just back from extended vacations and starting to look at those September calendars and all the craziness that this “back to ...” month entails. No matter what you’re getting “back to” any schedule feels like a lot after the rudderless days of summer

The hot weather has softened a bit, but it’s still salad weather, though maybe heartier salads are in order now. Make things easy on yourself and create salads with leftovers from last night’s cookout.

Enter the chopped salad. Specifically, my father's chopped salad.

My very French father was the master of the very chopped salad.

It was the one American dish he fully embraced as it defied all the strict rules of the fancy French kitchens and restaurants where he worked. 

At the time, fancy L.A. restaurants like La Scala and Morton’s were famous for their chopped salads. But none held a candle to my fathers salads, each a  unique work of art, driven purely by the fridge contents of any particular day.

He loved the péle méle, freewheeling nature of it: open the fridge, pull out anything that's fresh and can be minced (including last night's leftover seared ahi tuna or roast chicken or lamb) and start chopping. Don’t stop until you’ve got a cramp in your wrist or our family's storied green ceramic salad bowl (a favorite wedding gift they'd received in 1960) can't possibly hold one. more. sprout.

These salads have always screamed “California” to me. And when I pine for home as a transplanted New Yorker, they are a huge part of what I miss. And when I see the abundance at the markets this time of year it's what I crave most.

There was no recipe for these “stream of consciousness” salads. My dad would just whip them up on Saturdays for lunch while my mother was picking my sister and me up from tennis lessons or Junior Lifeguards. Since he worked nights, Saturday lunch was his meal to prepare and he wanted to impress.

He always presented the salads with a bit of flourish — plum tomatoes carved to look like camellia buds. A ring of endive leaves jutting straight up past the rim of the bowl to look like a feather head-dress. In turn, when my daughters, Mina and Sabine, were little and would spend summers with my parents in Santa Monica, so that I could grow the farmers markets here in Westchester, he relished making these salads for them. The girls loved ferreting out the ingredients one by one, and, as farmers market urchins, they could identify, and loved, most of them.

The average ingredient count was about 14 (they once counted 21 and I got a phone call about that one) and the ingredients that turned up most were:avocado (it being California), seared tuna, sprouts, yellow and red peppers, cold chicken breast, bacon, hanger steak, blue cheese, feta cheese, cherry tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, corn off the cob, fennel, golden and red beets, mesclun mix or butter lettuce, olives, Chinese cabbage, scallions, peach slices, green beans, hard-boiled eggs, saucisson sec, smoked duck breast, endive, parsley, red onions, shallots, shrimp, cold poached salmon and capers.

And no matter the number of separate ingredients, it was always just right.

I think you get the point. 

It’s a simple recipe: buy and cook what you love. Then turn it into a monster salad for the ones you love.

But if you need one as a guidepost, just to get you started, try this this one.

We’ve got some great vendors this week who are not regulars: Make sure you hit up Butter & Bow with their stunning global-inspired cookies, Plantidote Foods, with their transformative veggie burgers (ask Danielle about the many creatively delicious ways to use them outside of a bun) and Wil-Hi Farm, purveyors of all things lamb.  Try these lamb kebabs with onion salad and look no. further than SAHA Guys for fresh pillowy pita bread and some lovely tangy tzatziki to serve them with. 

Grab dessert from Elderberry Road, or Silvia's Kitchen. You deserve it!

See you at the market!