Tag: Oregano

cabbage salad with lime and oregano

cabbage salad scallions oregano lime

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This salad recipe is based on one in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Suppers book. It’s fine even the next day as leftovers—it just gets to be more like cabbage pickles. It’s fantastic with homemade refried beans, or on top of the beans piled on a tostada… add diced avocados and you have a feast!! See the recipe for “tostadas three ways” for all kinds of recipes to serve with this salad!

If you’re serving this salad on its own (not with refried beans or something else), you can sprinkle it with toasted green pumpkin seeds (pepitas) for a little extra pizzaz. See instructions, below.

Tip: in case you like to make things occasionally with lime juice (like guacamole, or this recipe, for example) but you don’t always have limes hanging around, you can buy a big bag of them from Costco, squeeze them right away, and freeze the juice in small containers. Then you can just pop a container in the microwave for a few seconds when you need some fresh lime juice.

6 cups finely sliced green or red cabbage
1 ½ teaspoons sea salt or kosher salt
2 teaspoons sugar
¼ cup finely diced white onion or scallion
2 pinches dried oregano
2 to 4 tablespoons chopped cilantro (if you have it—but go ahead and make this salad without cilantro if you don’t have any hanging around.)
1/3 cup lime juice

Toss the cabbage with the salt and onion and sugar. Add the rest of the salad ingredients, toss well, and taste carefully. Does it need more sugar? More salt? More lime? Add until you’re happy with the flavors. Its should be bright and pickle-y, not bland. Refrigerate until ready to use.

toasted green pumpkin seeds
Put a ½ cup or so of green pumpkin seeds (not the ones from your Jack-O-Lantern, but the kind you can buy in bulk at the grocery store) in a skillet over medium-high heat and toast, stirring fairly constantly (with your extractor fan running for the inevitable smoke) until the seeds swell up and turn golden around the edges. Some will make popping noises. Pour onto a plate and let cool for a bit to crisp up before serving.

spaghetti with grape tomatoes, olives, capers, & pine nuts

tomatoes pasta spaghetti olives capers oregano pine nuts cherry tomatoes

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When the kalamata olive bread is on our baking schedule for the week, we like to make this pasta dish. The olives in the bread are great with the olives and capers in the pasta! If you want to heat a whole loaf of bread to eat with dinner, you can heat it, unwrapped, for 15 minutes in a 350 degree oven just before serving dinner.

Dan likes to call this recipe his signature dish, because he’s the only one who has the patience to cut all the grape tomatoes in half before roasting them. I think if you just left them whole (and let them burst in the oven) they’d be just fine—maybe the dish wouldn’t be as pretty, but it would still taste great!!

In the summer, we love to make this recipe with local cherry tomatoes, but we make this recipe all year ‘round with big boxes of grape tomatoes from Costco. The original recipe (from Cooks Illustrated) called for this amount of sauce for a whole pound of pasta, but we like twice as many tomatoes for our pasta—so please note that the recipe below only calls for a half-pound of pasta. We always make a double batch to have plenty of leftovers, so we buy two of those giant boxes of grape tomatoes at a time. While you’re at Costco, you can pick up a giant jar of capers, a bag of pine nuts, a mesh bag of garlic, a huge jug of olive oil, a big wedge of Parmesan cheese, and a jar of kalamata olives… Then you’re set up to make this dish whenever you get a hankering!

2 pounds grape tomatoes, halved pole to pole
2 tablespoons olive oil
sea salt or kosher salt
½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
6 large cloves garlic, sliced thin
¼ cup rinsed and drained capers
½ pound spaghetti (I like whole-wheat, especially DeCecco or Ronzoni)
½ cup pitted and sliced kalamata olives
¼ cup chopped flat-leaved parsley
¼ cup pine nuts, toasted (optional)
2 ounces grated Parmesan cheese (optional)

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. In a medium bowl, gently toss tomatoes with oil, ½ teaspoon salt, pepper flakes, pepper, garlic, and capers. Coat a rimmed baking sheet with non-stick spray or oil. Spread tomatoes in an even layer on baking sheet and roast until tomato skins are slightly shriveled (tomatoes should retain their shape), 35 to 40 minutes. Do not stir tomatoes during roasting. Remove from the oven and cool 5 to 10 minutes.
2. While tomatoes cook, bring a large pot of water to boil. Just before removing tomatoes from the oven, stir 1 tablespoon salt and pasta into boiling water and cook until al dente. Drain pasta and return to pot. Scrape tomatoes into pot on top of pasta, add olives and parsley; toss to combine. Serve immediately, sprinkling pine nuts and optional cheese over individual bowls.