Tempeh for a Big Salad

June and early July mean harvesting lots of lettuce and spicy greens from the garden. I do make a lot of simple green salads with meals. However, I really enjoy having garden fresh greens to use in one of my favorite meal concepts “the Big Salad.” I put together mixes of tofu or tempeh, cheese, cooked veggies, raw veggies, beans, grains and herbs with the greens and suitable dressing for a complete and delicious meal. The trick is not to use too many things, or else the greens get lost. You also want to choose things that will harmonize. For example, vegetables cooked in with Asian style seasonings (soy sauce, ginger and sesame oil) might not go so well with balsamic vinaigrette and sun dried tomatoes. Within these basic guidelines, anything goes!

Spicy Greens

I first discovered the Big Salad concept about 15 years ago in the cookbook that really got me going on creative vegetarian cooking “The American Vegetarian” by Marylin Diamond. I’ve been playing around with it ever since. In the winter, when salad greens are mediocre, it helps enhance that dose of fresh greens that we need. In the spring and early summer when the greens are great, it makes for a delicious meal. I look forward to the “salad days” all year.

Lately, I’ve been inspired anew by the eating at the Candle Cafe and by their cookbook. Their fabulous salads and their recipes reminded me of a technique I had sort of forgotten about: marinating tofu and tempeh. Tempeh and tofu treated this way make a great component to a big salad.

Here is one flavorful way that I like to prepare tempeh to use in these salads.

Tempeh for a Big Salad

This is more than you need for a big salad for two, but it is so good as leftovers it is worth it to make extra.

2 8 oz packages of tempeh

1/2 cup of soy sauce, tamari or bragg’s liquid aminos

2/3 cup of apple juice

1/4 cup of agave syrup, or honey or other sweetner

4 tbs of chopped garlic

3 tbs of grated ginger

1 tsp dried chile flakes

fresh ground pepper to taste

Grated Ginger

Combine all of the ingredients except the tempeh in a shallow baking dish or other container. This is your marinade. Cut each package of tempeh into 4 equal pieces and place into the marinade.

You can now do a couple of different things with this. Both methods make for flavorful tempeh.

A. If you made this in a baking dish, you can immediately put the whole thing into a 350 degree oven and bake for one hour, cool slightly and slice for salad.

B. Leave the tempeh in it’s marinade for a couple of hours or overnight. You can then bake the whole thing as above. You can also take the tempeh out of it’s marinade, slice it and saute until slightly browned.

Marinating Tempeh

The big salad pictorial continues here.

Spiced Nuts

Over the last few years I’ve tried to make holiday gifts for anyone I’d like to give a small gift to (coworkers etc). Some years have been more successful than others to be sure. I’ve decided that it works out best when I pick one thing to make for everyone. This year I decided on a food gift. I wanted something foolproof. After a thumbing through my cookbooks and thinking about it for a while, I decided on Spiced Nuts. In one of my cookbooks I had found the index card that I had scribbled the recipe on after tasting the ones that someone else made years before. Since then, I make them each year around the holidays as a treat for us to have at home. They are pretty easy to make and are delicious, and much much better than anything similar that you could buy. Obviously, this gift does not work for people with nut allergies or for vegans (egg whites are involved).

Spiced Nuts

I am going to start taking more about the costs of ingredients. I think people might be interested, and it will be useful for me to think about. Here is what I bought for this project:

$65.08 for 8.39 lbs of nuts
pecans $18.35 (2.45 lbs @ 7.49/lb)
cashew pieces $16.01 (3.82 @4.19/lb
almonds $30.72 (2.12 @14.49/lb)

$2 worth of spices, (cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, coriander)also purchased in bulk. This is an educated guess, since I purchased quantities larger than I needed for this recipe for other uses, but it definitely wasn’t more than this.

$6 worth of sweetners ( I used regular sugar for some batches, date sugar for others, as some people would rather not eat sugar.)

$2.69 worth of eggs ( I used the better part of a dozen egg whites. I was able to use most of the yolks for other baking, but I’m just counting it here as a dozen.)

$9.75 (9.29 +tax) for 1 doz. quart canning jars

$10 on ribbons etc (mostly from the dollar store but I did decorate a few with some beautiful high end ribbon, but frankly the curly ribbon dollar store stuff came together better)

$95.52 was the total, which actually does seem like a lot for some nuts. But, this breaks down to $7.96 per gift (one gift=one jar), plus an entire Saturday afternoon to make (my free time = priceless). This works with my budget and my rhetoric.

I made 12 quart jars full. This was enough for what I needed, plus a couple extra just in case, that we will be only too happy to eat at home, if I don’t give them away.

Recipes abound for this stuff. I had my original recipe on my index card, which appears to be Martha Stewart’s recipe. A handful of recipes pop up on Epicurious. Turns out Alton Brown had the same idea (and there are plenty of recipes from the FoodTV crew.) The Splendid Table has another take. Seems like most of the usual recipe sites pop up in the results when you Google it. I landed on a version similar to my index card, with a few pointer’s from a sidebar in Cook’s Country (subscription needed) from December 2007.

I went with an egg white version rather than a butter version. I find the whole butter method a bit greasy after these things sit around (oh but for eating while still warm, it is divine.) I went with the oven method, because it would be easier to make a lot. I chose a combo of cinnamon, ginger, cardamom and coriander for the flavors. I picked my three favorite nuts pecans, almonds and cashews to blend together, although just pecans would also be a good choice.

Fresh nuts are essential to this recipe. I cannot emphasize this enough. The best nuts around here come from the bulk bins at local health food stores. The turn around of product is high and the quality control good. An added bonus is that you can by exactly what you will use in a relatively short amount of time (a few months max, refrigerated if possible). Nuts are oily and therefore will go rancid quickly in your cabinet (or on a shelf in the market), it’s a fact of life. They may not have spoiled enough to make you sick, but they will not taste as they should.

The same is true for the spices. I bought mine in bulk at the same time as the nuts. They were so fresh that their aroma filled the car on the way home. That said, the quantity of spice in the recipe is very important. You want enough so that the flavor comes through nicely, but not so much that it’s like eating potpourri. 8 teaspoons total was a good amount for each two pounds of nuts. The flavor was a bit strong fresh out of the oven, but mellowed a bit after the nuts cooled.

As far as technique is concerned a couple of key things stood out. First, draining the nuts for a few minutes after tossing them with the egg white and before tossing them with the sugar and spice made a big difference in the final result (not draining meant some of the nuts were surrounded by a thin crusty collar of baked egg white). Second, lining the baking sheets with parchment paper was absolutely essential–other wise the nuts would stick, even to a nonstick pan. The parchment also made it possible to use the same pans for each batch of the whole 8+ pounds (I only own three baking sheets–if I’d had to clean and dry them each time, I’d still be making the nuts instead of writing about it.) Third, a fairly cool oven toasts the nuts nicely, without there being danger of going from toasted to burnt in an instant as is the case with a hot oven. 300 degrees was just right, and I used an oven thermometer to check that 300 on the dial meant 300 in the oven (a slight adjustment was necessary).

After the nuts had cooled completely, I filled the jars. During the baking time of a couple of the batches, I had cut out circles of wrapping paper, using the lid of the canning jar as a guide. I had wanted the wide mouth jars for this, but all that the store had left was the narrow mouth style.

Decorative lid

I had picked out different, fancier paper with visions of using the wide mouth jars. The pattern did not work with the narrow mouth jars, so I used a different paper that I had on hand.

I finished the decorating with various ribbons. Pictured here is the classic “curly ribbon”.

Fits with the festive mood

So even if you don’t make them as gifts, it’s a good make ahead party snack, or just something nice to have anytime.

Recipe here.