If you're just a beginner and not that experienced with artfully turning canned fruit into bugs and bunnies or making deviled eggs into tiny chickens, you can start out with something easy.
Just turn a wad of frozen condiments and sea food into a beautiful garden by adding a sprig of watercress and olive flowers on top.
Once you've got the garden down, maybe you can move up to a still life with a bunch of grapes.
Of course, the easy part is making the grapes look like grapes. The harder part is gluing them all to a pear half.
But, hey! That's what they make cream cheese for. It's edible salad glue.
If you're having a special ladies' luncheon, though, the ladies won't be really impressed unless you can make them some flowers. (And they are heartily sick of radish roses! Every 1940s home cook could make those in their sleep (I imagine)!)
They need bigger roses! With pasty petals!
Yes, of course cream cheese makes the magic happen, this time pressed into service as rose petals, and a little egg yolk dust in the center completes the flowery illusion.
If you're really serious about having flowers, though, you've got to make the pots and the flowers. Yes, if you want the Benevolent Lutheran Ladies' Children's Hospital Community Outreach Association and Charitable Trust for the Children to really remember you and maybe elect you treasurer next year, you need to make spring flower salads.
Start out with the pots:
This time, the cream cheese gelatin gets anchovy paste or, if you're feeling wild, Roquefort cheese.
Then decide what weird combination of ingredients you want to turn into flowers. You can go with the sedate but timeless classic lilies of the valley.
Easy! A little endive, a few chives, and some artfully-piped cream cheese.
If you're feeling a little more adventurous...
...pipe some tinted cream cheese onto a piece of pineapple surrounded by endive to make a hyacinth!
If you really like stacking, try some tulips!
Just layer pineapple slices and tomato wedges (yum!) over a green pepper stalk, again with endive leaves. (Strange how all the flowers have the same leaf structure!)
And if you're thinking of running for president of the BLLCHCOAaCTftC, maybe make all three! Or you can just be lazy like me and admire the photos on a warm summer day. Eat cream cheese straight from the block if you need your fix. I won't tell.
French dressing? French dressing!!!! Why take a perfectly good pile of fruit glued together with cream cheese and serve it with French dressing?
ReplyDeleteSo much for admonishing kids to not play with their food. If you were a lucky kid, you could get away with looking at these salads, saying they were too pretty to eat, and get away with skipping yet another horrifying meal that someone spent way too much time on.
I'm pretty much always horrified by salad dressing, so it doesn't really matter which type they call for as far as I'm concerned. At least the dressing chapter lists a lemon French dressing intended for fruit salads that might be marginally better than regular French dressing, though you'd think they'd specify it in recipes where it might work best. (There's even a cream cheese ginger variation of lemon French dressing that could add extra cream cheese to the salad if you so desired.)
DeleteOkay, I'm also really curious about the French dressing, because at one point, that basically just meant "vinaigrette." Do they include a recipe for French dressing in the book, or are you simply meant to divine whether you should use a version with ketchup or not? 😉
ReplyDeleteThere's a salad dressing chapter at the end of the book, and French dressing is WELL covered. The basic French dressing recipe has 18 variations (including anchovy, cottage cheese, ginger ale, and "India" (which calls for chutney, chopped hard-cooked eggs, and curry powder) versions). Plus, there's a Lemon French Dressing (which uses lemon juice instead of vinegar and seems intended for fruit salads) with 10 variations. Interestingly, ketchup is never involved. The tomato variation uses tomato juice, garlic, and confectioners' sugar.
DeleteHoly cats! That's a lot of French dressings! I'm glad there's some options that make sense - the pear-grapes would be pretty nice with ginger or lemon, I bet.
DeleteThe tomato one sounds fuckin gross, though. I already dislike tomato juice, and I can't imagine powdered sugar would improve it.
In its defense, there's a not a lot of powdered sugar in the tomato variation. I imagine it's to balance out the acidity of tomato the way sweeteners are used in ketchup, but honestly, I wouldn't want to try it.
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