I love feta so much, and I eat a lot of it. I find it really versatile and as long as I have some in the fridge I feel confident that I can pull together some sort of tasty meal, even when other supplies are low - something from the pantry or freezer, plus some vegetables, even the wilty, bottom-of-the-crisper variety, can nearly always be combined with feta to make a meal I’ll get excited about.
Read moregrilled patty pan salad
I found the most beautiful, alien-looking patty pan squash at the market this week: little knobbly, pale green flying saucers, bright yellow miniature crooknecks, two-toned oblongs. They are such strange, lovely shapes it almost seemed a shame to cut them up and cook them. I spent a day just looking at them, trying to decide what recipe would do them justice.
I decided to make them into a warm salad with some feta, olives and lemon. This salad is great on it's own or heaped up on a crispy piece of toasted sourdough. Leftovers are really good tossed with some pasta or cooked wheat berries and arugula and keep really well as a pasts/grain salad. It lasts really well so you won't have to turn on the stove for a couple days if you make a big batch.
grilled patty pan squash salad:
1-2 pounds patty pan squash, halved
olive oil
1/2 cup feta, crumbled
1/4 cup kalamata olives
chili flakes
parsley, chopped
juice from one lemon
Brush patty pan with olive oil and grill on medium high heat on a BBQ or grill pan until dark grill marks appear. Flip and grill until all sides are browned. Toss with feta, olives, chili flakes, parsley and squeeze lemon juice over the top.
Serve heaped over toasted sourdough, rub the bread with half a clove of garlic after you toast it, or toss it into some pasta, or just eat the salad on it's own.
big herb salad
Perhaps you are feeling, as I am, just a little overfed after the holiday season. My personal chocolate:vegetable ratio has been way off for a few weeks and I needed a little correction. This salad is an excellent and delicious way to get an entire day's vegetable servings in one meal. So efficient! Any new year's resolutions you may have about eating mountains of vegetables will be so easy to follow now.
The abundance of bright, sunny herbs in this salad has been helping to combat my feelings of cold weather grumpiness. It's the opposite of standard winter fare, cozy warm, soups and stews and hearty, heavy dishes. Those are good too, but sometimes I want another kind of comforting winter meal, one that feels light and bright and reminds me that winter cannot actually last forever. It feels really luxurious to use herbs this way, as generously as a vegetable rather than as a sparse topping.
Adding some roasted salmon or falafel makes it into a very filling meal. You can swap or add herbs; cilantro and basil would be great in this too.
big herb salad:
serves two as a main meal, more as a side
- 1 cup shredded purple cabbage
- 1/2 cucumber, thinly sliced
- 2 cups baby spinach
- 1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved
- 1 cup pea shoots
- 1/4 cup kalamata olives, roughly chopped
- 1 cup fresh parsley, chopped
- 1 cup fresh mint, chopped
- 1 cup fresh dill, chopped
- a few slices of feta cheese
Combine all ingredients and dress with yogurt dressing. Salt and pepper to taste.
spicy yogurt dressing:
- 1/2 cup plain yogurt
- juice from one lemon
- 3 tbs olive oil
- 2 tsp dried dill
- 1 tsp cumin
- 1 tsp garlic powder
- 1 tsp crushed chile flakes
- 1 tsp salt
Blend all ingredients together and drizzle over salad.
Photos: Tyrel Hiebert
grilled eggplant, olive and feta pizza
I have never understood the advice I see in cookbooks and all over the food-internet about how to reduce the bitterness of eggplants. I have never found eggplant to be bitter. It seems like it has a sweet and fairly bland flavour best served by grilling or roasting to caramelize it and give a flavour boost. If any quality of eggplant were to be widely lamented, I would have thought that it would be eggplant's tendency to go a bit spongy and stodgy if cooked badly or in too-large pieces. But anti-bitterness advice abounds.
Am I just winning the eggplant lottery? Choosing sweet and mild eggplants every time while others wind up with sad, acrid specimens that they are forced to attempt to debitter?
Maybe I missing some vital eggplant-detecting tastebuds or genes?
The most troubling possibility though, is the thought that maybe eggplant isn't actually bitter at all. Perhaps all this talk of bitterness is a lie, an international conspiracy by a shadowy anti-eggplant lobby. Moving in the darkness, these eggplant slanderers work to discourage eggplant use and to generally smear its good name. They are probably also behind the popular and, quite frankly, vulgar use of the eggplant emoji. Another bald-faced attempt to sour public opinion of the eggplant.
Obviously eggplant's continued popularity is the only thing between us and the new world order, or full reptilian takeover or some similarly apocalyptic fate. Help fight the eggplant-illuminati by making this tasty eggplant pizza. It's olivey and garlicky and feta-briney and a little bit spicy. But it's not bitter.
Eggplant note: I did nothing in this recipe to combat bitterness because, as noted, eggplant is not bitter. However, if you find eggplant bitter, do whatever you normally do to prevent that. Just like the man wants you to.
pizza dough
adapted from smitten kitchen
- 1 1/2 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 3/4 teaspoon active dry yeast
- 1/2 cup warm water
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
Put flour, salt and yeast in a bowl and add water and oil. Stir until everything mostly comes together. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead for a couple minutes. Lightly oil a bowl and place dough in the bowl, turning to coat dough with oil on all sides. Cover with a kitchen towel and let rise in a warm spot for 1-2 hours or until doubled in size.
Deflate the dough gently and gather into a ball. Set aside while you prepare the toppings.
eggplant, feta and olive pizza:
- olive oil, a couple big glugs
- a big handful cherry tomatoes, sliced very thinly
- 4 cloves garlic
- chile flakes
- one medium eggplant
- 2 cups shredded mozzarella
- 1 cup crumbled feta
Grate four cloves of garlic with a rasp. Combine with 3 tbs olive oil and a large pinch of chile flakes. Set aside.
Brush eggplant slices with olive oil. Grill slices on a grill pan or barbecue over medium heat until they have deep brown grill marks, about two minutes. Flip and repeat until all slices are well grilled on both sides.
Stretch dough large enough to fit to the edges of a cookie sheet. Sprinkle the cookie sheet with rough cornmeal and place the dough on top. Brush the dough with the chili garlic oil, making sure to coat the edges well. Lay tomato slices over the dough.
Sprinkle 2/3 of the mozzarella over the dough. Lay eggplant slices over the cheese in an even layer. Sprinkle olives, feta and a bit more mozzarella on top. Crack black pepper over top. Bake the pizza as hot as your oven will go until the cheese is blistered and the exposed crust round the edges is golden.
Photos: Tyrel Hiebert
herbed harissa & feta carrot salad
I know that January is basically over, but I still feel like I am rebounding from my steady holiday diet of chocolate, cookies, wine and beef wellington. This salad is exactly the kind of thing I like to eat a lot of when I have spent a couple weeks eating...richly. It helps me feel balanced to eat big bowlfuls of bright, tasty vegetables.
I saw this recipe over at smitten kitchen a little while ago and it looked great; I slotted it away in the back of my mind as a thing to try and then half forgot about it. Then I heard Molly Wizenberg talking about on Spilled Milk's carrot episode (Spilled Milk is a great podcast by the way, you should all go check it out!) and I remembered my intention to eat this salad. After it came so highly recommended by two brilliant women, I really had no choice.
I made a few changes; I upped the herbs a lot. The original calls for a couple tablespoons each mint and parsley, I used at least a cup of each. I like how fresh and bright it is with large amounts of herbs, and it feels luxurious to treat them as another vegetable rather than a garnish.
Note: Harissa is a chili and spice paste from North Africa. You can find it lots of supermarkets or specialty food stores. It's worth hunting around for, but if you're having difficulty finding it, this dressing will still be great with some chili flakes or powder for some heat.
herbed harissa & feta carrot salad:
adapted from the genius smitten kitchen (where it was adapted from a reader, who adapted it from her mother who may have adapted it from cuisine magazine)
- around 10 large carrots, washed and peeled if you feel like it (I didn't)
- 1 cup parsley, finely chopped
- 1 cup mint, finely chopped
- 1/3 cup olive oil
- 1/3 cup lemon juice
- 2 cloves garlic, grated on a fine rasp
- 1 1/2 tsp cumin (I like a lot of cumin, but you can dial it back if you prefer)
- 1/2 tsp paprika
- 1 tsp harissa (I have a really mild harissa and I actually used more than this. Add it a bit at a time until you have the heat you would like)
- 1/2 tsp sugar
- salt and pepper
- 1/21 cup feta, crumbled
Grate the carrots on the large holes of a box grater or on a food processor grater blade if you have one. Toss carrots, mint and parsley together in a bowl.
Combine all other ingredients together in a small jar and shake to combine. Drizzle over carrots and toss to combine. Let the salad sit and absorb the dressing for at least a half hour. Sprinkle feta over salad and eat it up.
Photo credits: Tyrel Hiebert
chickpea burgers with red pepper-feta spread and spicy-preserved-lemon-mayo
Summer is for burgers, and burgers are for barbecues and barbecues are for people who have a yard or a balcony or an outdoor space of some kind. I do not, in my current apartment, have any sort of outdoor space and so no barbecue and so not very many burgers. I do make them on the stove top occasionally, but it's not the same as barbecuing, it just doesn't seem quite right. Sometimes I think crazy thoughts like, "Maybe if I open ALL the windows, it would be fine to use a little barbecue inside..." and that kind of thinking is how bad decisions get made. I really need to move to somewhere with a yard so I can barbecue without risking gassing myself.
So I made these chickpea burgers in the oven, and then I reheated them in a grill pan to make them look barbecued so I can pretend I am living a life that involves real barbecuing. The grilling part is optional, you can use them straight out of the oven if you want to. Extras freeze really well and you can thaw them and reheat them in the oven or in a grill pan, or on the barbecue if you are blessed with a yard.
Veggie burgers can be great, they can also be really boring and sad and I feel like the toppings often make or break the veggie burger. They tend to be on the bland side and are therefore excellent vehicles for tasty spreads and crispy greens. I made two spreads for these burgers; a roasted red pepper feta spread (which I make quite a bit to eat on slices of cucumbers and carrots) and mayo with preserved lemons and chilies. The mild nuttiness of chickpeas is an excellent canvass for these bold flavours.
chickpea burgers:
- one tin chickpeas
- 1/4-1/2 cup chickpea flour, and a little extra for dredging
- one egg
- one shallot or small yellow onion
- one clove garlic
- 1 teaspoon mustard powder
- salt and pepper
Blend everything together in a food processor, adjusting the chickpea flour until a very thick paste is formed. Scoop out 1/4 cups of the mixture and coat them in extra chickpea flour. An ice cream scoop with a release mechanism works great for the scooping because the mixture is very sticky. Place the scoops onto a parchment lined cookie sheet and flatten into 4 inch rounds. Bake patties at 350 for 10 minutes, until they are browned on the bottom, flip over and bake for 5-10 more minutes, until set and brown on both sides. If you want to, grill them on a barbecue or grill pan until nice grill marks appear.
red pepper feta spread:
- 1/2 cup feta, crumbled
- 1/4 cup cream cheese
- 3-4 pieces of jarred roasted red pepper
- 1 clove garlic
- lots of fresh ground pepper
Blend everything together in a food processor until it forms a paste.
spicy preserved lemon mayo:
- 1/4 a preserved lemon and a small fresh red chili, roughly chopped together
- 1 large or extra large egg (medium eggs or smaller will need two)
- 1 cup light, neutral oil, almond works well
Immersion blender method: in a pint size mason jar with a wide mouth opening (or similarly shaped container) that fits the immersion blender, place an egg and a cup of oil. Place the immersion blender all the way into the jar and blend, holding the blender still until the mayo becomes very thick. Add the preserved lemon and blend until incorporated.
Food processor method: Put the egg in the food processor and, with the machine running, add oil in a slow stream. Once emulsified, add preserved lemon and chile and blend until incorporated.
assembly:
I put spinach, pea shoots and avocado on these burgers, and lots of feta pepper spread and lemon mayo.
Photo credit: Tyrel Hiebert