Sunday, July 8, 2007

A Tale of Two Salads

Yesterday, when we were at Williams Sonoma making a return, D and I found a gadget called the "Corn Zipper" to be used for taking kernels off the cob. This morning I put it to the test with 10 ears of leftover corn on the cob. At first it was working okay, but after about 5 ears I cut my thumb. D then came in and noted I was using it incorrectly - he had read the instructions on the package about how to hold it. It was MUCH easier after that. The Corn Zipper removed the kernels quickly and easily, though it makes a little bit of a mess (so does a knife).


Once the corn was off the cob, I had to decide what to do with it. I consulted our cookbooks, but everything required ingredients I didn't have on hand. Then I remembered that my sister-in-law comment from yesterday indicated that she likes a Martha Stewart corn salad recipe. I checked MarthaStewart.com and found the recipe. It called for just corn, white wine vinegar, olive oil, scallions, salt and pepper--perfect! I put 1/2 the corn in another bowl (so I could make 2 different recipes) and not having white wine vinegar, I substituted rice vinegar for the first bowl of corn. As I was chopping the scallions, I thought lime juice would make a great substitution for the white wine vinegar, so I added the juice of 1 lime to the 2nd bowl. Both bowls then got some olive oil, salt and pepper and the lime juice bowl got a handful of cilantro while the rice vinegar bowl got some grated ginger root. Both salads were delicious!

As I was just finishing up, D's brother-in-law called to say they were on their way home from Maine and would be arriving at our house in less than 2 hours. I was excited to serve them corn salad for lunch!

Being on a cooking binge I then decided to make banana bread (because having a 350 degree oven on for 1 1/2 hours on an 85 degree day didn't seem insane to me at the time). As the banana bread was baking, I made a watermelon salad with the 1/2 melon leftover from the 4th of July. Then I decided to grill some sweet potatoes to go with lunch. I consulted a new cookbook we just received the other day and found a recipe (basically I just wanted to know how long to cook the slices). We used our new shaker basket for the grilling.

My sister-in-law, brother-in-law, and nephew stopped by for a tour of the house and a quick lunch of the food I had prepared this morning and brought a fabulous peach foccacia from a bakery in Portland.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Like seeing the corn zipper! When we got home we had the WS catalog and think maybe we'll get one too. Great meal - love the mention of the peach foccacia ;) Thanks again for having us. xo

Anonymous said...

Wow! I made the blog!! Am most flattered! Corn salad looks great and love that zipper! May have to get one, myself. As am typing this, Avery is with me, and wanting to say hello to Auntie Laura.....Hello! xoxo bsil