Showing posts with label salad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label salad. Show all posts

Monday, April 1, 2013

to do it justice


For as long as I can remember, I've felt an obligation to testify, in the most basic sense of the word: to make a statement based on personal knowledge or belief : to bear witness. When I was a little girl, I wrote poems about the things that happened in my small world—seasons, teachers I admired, friends and relatives who died, holidays. As a second grader, I composed a letter to my Aunt Sherry telling her about how my friend had gone to the doctor and found out her breast was growing. "And I found out I had the same thing!" I explained, as if the breast bud were a tumor or an infection. This was no coincidence; for weeks I'd noticed that I could no longer lean my chest against the dash of my mom's van without wincing, which I saw as a sure sign that something malignant was growing inside my body. Then, as now, I always assumed that it was only a matter of time before I contracted the terminal disease that was coming to me. When I got my first period, even as an eleven-year-old, my first thought ran like this: Of course. Cancer. Even though the secret ate me up, it still took a full 36 hours before I could tell my mom. I don't know why. I think I believed I was really dying this time, and I felt ashamed, because I knew I must have done something terrible to deserve it.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

arugula salad

My friends know that the word "arugula" makes me giggle. When you say it, it sounds like the noise that an old-timey car horn makes: ah-rOOOO-gu-la


Anyway, this is one of the easiest salads I've ever made, and I can't seem to stop eating it. It's lovely: crunchy, peppery, salty, and a little bit tart. Even D likes it with his pizza, and he is emphatically anti-salad when it comes to pizza accompaniments. 


Another way we love to eat it is piled on top of a homemade thin crust pizza - we got that idea from an episode of The Best Thing I Ever Ate, where Ted Allen describes his favorite pizza, the arugula and parmesan pie from Graziella's in Brooklyn.


arugula salad
2 to 3 c. arugula leaves, washed & dried
juice of a lemon wedge (or two)
2 to 3 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp. coarse kosher sea salt
1/4 tsp. coarsely ground black pepper
2 to 3 tbsp. shredded or shaved Parmesan


Feel free to eyeball all of the ingredients and adjust the amounts for your own taste - you can't really go wrong here. Toss everything together just before serving and pile into salad bowls or on top of pizza. Enjoy!


Cheers,
H.