Making 1970's Midwestern-Style "Salads"

It’s been awhile since my last update on Have Dog, Will Drive! Soon, I will share more about the rollercoaster of a summer that Grace and I have had. You can also tune into our podcast, which is the best place to get updates these days. But I still really love blogging and plan to always keep this space alive :)

The reason I’m popping in now is to share a post that accompanies our latest podcast episode, all about making old-school, midwestern-style, church potluck-esque salads.

“Salad” is actually not the operative word here.

This whole idea started a couple of months ago when Grace posed a question to Instagram: What is the weirdest salad you’ve ever had? People wrote in with all kinds of crazy things, like Snickers salad, hot cheeto salad, strawberry pretzel cream cheese salad, “frog eye” salad, and more. Then it became a running joke on the podcast. Grace wanted to do a “salad episode” where we talked about the weirdest salads we could find, and did some taste testing. Honestly, I thought it was too weird and people would think we’d really lost the plot. But I was slowly proven wrong…

I got SO many messages about fond church potluck salad memories. Probably more than any other topic we’d floated, our listeners wrote in via email, DM, etc., to say they wanted a salad episode!

Right around the time we started thinking it might actually be time to do this, we noticed that we hit 100,000 downloads on Under Our Roof. YAY! It’s such an honor to know that people tune in each week, and I get a little bit emotional when I think about the fact that we’ve actually gathered a little community through this fun project. We’ve even met some of our listeners in person! And I’d LOVE to do more of that.

Anyway, the 100,000 download mark seemed like the perfect time to do a salad episode to celebrate. So as of the time this blog post goes live, you can hear all about our experimental “cooking” day!

Because we wanted to offer some kind of visual component for this one, I decided to dust off the blog and share some of the photos. The best way to fully experience The Salad Episode is to listen to the podcast and then also check out these pics. I’m also sharing the recipes (and a couple of extras below) in case you want to try to recreate this! I really hope you enjoy this weird podcast/blog digression :)

Orange Fluff Salad

Recipe (sent in by a podcast listener—thanks, Lauren!):

ORANGE FLUFF SALAD

8 oz frozen whipped topping, thawed

3 oz package orange gelatin mix, just the powder

16 oz of 4% fat cottage cheese, small or large curd will work

14 oz can mandarin oranges, drained

1 cup mini marshmallows

Combine the thawed whipped topping and orange gelatin powder together in a large bowl and stir until combined.

Add in the cottage cheese, mandarin oranges and mini marshmallows and gently fold in until mixture is combined.

Enjoy right away or chill covered in the fridge until ready to serve.

The orange fluff salad was probably the weirdest thing we made. Not my personal favorite (you can hear more about it on the podcast), but apparently very authentically church potlucky. I grew up in a church where such things were not on the menu, haha.

Grace loved it!

Next up…

Pea ‘n’ Peanut Salad

Linking the recipe here—from Taste of Home.

We knew we wanted to do one fully savory/salty salad, and peas seem to be ubiquitous in a lot of these kinds of recipes. This one has just a few ingredients: peas, roasted peanuts, red onion, celery, bacon, and a dressing made from Italian dressing + mayo.

This one was great!! The only thing I would have changed is making my own homemade Italian-style dressing, but I wanted to be true to the recipe making it for this challenge. The finely chopped red onion and celery add crunch (along with the bacon + peanuts). It was overall just a great side dish I thought.

Then for a super dessert-y salad, we made…

Snickers Salad, a.k.a Candy Bar Apple Salad

The recipe for this one is linked here, also from Taste of Home.

This might have been the salad that sounded the weirdest to me when I was first rounding up some recipes. But it ended up being really delicious!

The ingredients are all things I would normally eat on their own—Snickers, apples, cool whip, vanilla pudding. Mixed all together and set in the fridge for a couple of hours, and it was actually a delicious crunchy sweet velvety treat. Still weird, but good!

We spent such a fun morning creating these concoctions, tasting them, and recording the podcast episode.

I’m going to leave you with a couple of extras. First, Lauren, our listener who sent in the Orange Fluff recipe, also sent the following recipes:

LUTHERAN SALAD

2 sm. pkgs. lime Jello

2 c. hot water

1/2 pkg. miniature marshmallows

1 c. crushed pineapple, drained

1 c. cottage cheese

1 c. Cool whip

1 c. walnuts, cut fine

Dissolve the Jello in hot water. When Jello begins to set, add the remaining ingredients. Decorate the top with maraschino cherries if feeling wicked. Place in refrigerator until ready to use.

(I've also seen this done with shredded coconut mixed in. Go crazy!)

---

STRAWBERRY PRETZEL SALAD

2 c. crushed pretzel sticks, coarse

3/4 c. melted margarine

1/3 c. sugar

1 8-oz. pkg. cream cheese

1 c. sugar

1 9-oz pkg Cool Whip, thawed

1 lg. box Strawberry Jello

2 c. boiling water

2 10-oz. pkgs sliced sweetened strawberries, thawed

Preparation

Combine pretzels, margarine and 1/3 cup sugar and press into bottom of 9 X 13-inch baking pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes. Cool. Combine softened cream cheese and 1 cup sugar. Mix until well blended. Fold in whipped topping. Spread on top of pretzels and chill. Dissolve gelatin in boiling water; add strawberries. Chill until partially set. Pour over cream cheese layer. Chill until firm.

Lastly, a link to my all-time favorite Martha Stewart coleslaw recipe. We reference it in the podcast episode, so I wanted to include it here. I can’t take credit for it, but I have made it dozens of times for Grace and it’s a staple for summer celebrations. I’m not a “coleslaw person”—wouldn’t normally order it at a restaurant or anything. But I CRAVE this coleslaw. Don’t skip out on the grated onion, trust me. If you can, chop all the veggies yourself—I’m convinced that pre-shredded, dried-out cabbage and carrots is the culprit behind a lot of mediocre coleslaw.

Happy salad making!

The Rare & Special Loquat Crumble

There are many reasons why springtime is my favorite season of the year. But one of them is definitely loquats.

If you’ve never heard of this little fruit, I’m sure you’re not alone. They are not sold commercially pretty much anywhere in the United States. In fact, this LA Times article has a fascinating story about what is believed to be the only commercial planting of loquats in the US (located right near me in Malibu, California). Apparently they can sometimes be found in farmer’s markets, but I’ve never seen them.

In our neighborhood, they grow EVERYWHERE. The streets are littered with them. They only grow and ripen a few weeks each year, but in April, it’s basically raining loquats in Southern California. They’re surprisingly common all over the world, despite being very under-the-radar. They originated in China, where they are sold still on the branch, tied with decorative string. In Japan, they are prized, and sold in white boxes like candy or jewels. And they are popular in Italy and Australia as well.

But, they spoil very easily, and oftentimes the “best” fruit looks dented and bruised—that actually makes it sweeter! But also less appealing in a supermarket.

I had never heard of them or tasted one until moving to Southern California, but now it is one of my most special yearly traditions to pick a harvest of ripe loquats and bake a crumble every spring.

This past week, that’s exactly what I did. I’m on such a happy high from eating these delicious gems, which taste like a mix between plums, apricots, cherries, and peaches. Today I want to share my recipe with you—and you might be surprised to find that they grow near you! I loved reading this article from one of my mom’s favorite magazines, Garden & Gun, about all of the places they can be found in the American South.

This is the loquat recipe I’ve used the past couple of years, and I have to say it is absolutely delicious. 10/10! Adapted from Allrecipes.com.

Ingredients:

~8 cups fresh loquats, de-seeded and cut in half (skins still on)

Juice of 2 lemons

1 cup sugar

1/4 cup cornstarch

1 cup all-purpose flour (I actually used type 00 flour this year because I was out of regular, and it was still delicious… this is a very forgiving recipe)

1 cup packed light brown sugar

1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Small pinch of table salt

7 tablespoons butter, very cold, and cut into pieces or grated

First, you pick your loquats, if you are lucky enough to live near a tree.

Second, wash, de-seed, and cut up the loquats.

Each loquat has large, glossy seeds in the middle—around 1 -3 seeds per loquat. Apparently there are some seedless varieties, but that is not the kind that grow near me.

Third, pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Fourth, toss the cut and cleaned loquats with the juice of 2 lemons.

Fifth, transfer the loquats to a large pot/saucepan on medium-low heat and simmer for about 15 minutes, until they become really juicy and start to break down. Stir often.

Sixth, whisk together the cup of sugar and 1/4 cup of cornstarch, then add it into the simmering loquats. Stir until combined and simmer for a couple minutes—this will start to get thick like pie filling!

Seventh, heat a cast-iron pan (empty) in the 400 degree oven for about 5 minutes. Take the cast iron out, add the loquat filling.

Eighth, mix together the rest of the ingredients: flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, salt, and cold butter in small pieces. Combine thoroughly with a pastry cutter or your hands until the mixture resembles coarse, wet sand.

Ninth, cover the loquat filling evenly with the brown sugar mixture and then put the cast iron pan back in the oven.

Tenth, bake for about 25 minutes until bubbling and golden.

Let cool for about 20 minutes, but serve while still warm. Recommended: vanilla ice cream on the side!

Omg, writing this post makes me sad that my loquat crumble is all gone. It’s the most special dessert of the whole year, because (a) it’s so delicious, but also most critically (b) it can only be made in a very tiny window in April each year.

I love slowing down and making my life special by marking the changing of the seasons with rituals and traditions like this. The loquat crumble is incredibly special in our little family, and making it helps me feel connected to the earth around me. So wild to think that all of the fruit (lemons included) grew within walking distance of my house! I love living in Southern California so much.

If you can get access to loquats, I hope this post gives you some inspiration to try them if you haven’t already! In the future, I would also love to try making loquat jam and loquat cocktails.

My Recent Fav No-Recipe, VERY Simple Meal

If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I love a good home-cooked meal. And I honestly really enjoy making more complicated things—IF I have a good amount of time in the evening. For me, spending 2 hours in the kitchen making something special and beautiful is a great way to unwind. I know a lot of people might not relate to that, but it is one of my passions!

BUT this post is not about that. This is about a meal I’ve been making recently that checks every box that I need on certain weeknights. It is quick, it is easy, it is healthy (tons of veggies and a bit of protein), and I find myself craving it.

I don’t even know what the name of this dish would be. It’s basically a big bowl of pasta with sauce, but you just use roasted vegetables instead of any pasta! I don’t know why I’ve never done this sooner, but it’s strangely DELICIOUS.

I almost feel silly making an entire blog post about this, because it’s one of those no-recipe recipes. There are no measurements. This is all you do:

1. Roast vegetables. Anything you like. My personal favorites are Romanesco (a green cousin of cauliflower—TRUST me on this. It’s one of my favorite veggies ever), regular cauliflower, zucchini, peppers, mushrooms, asparagus, green beans, the list goes on. In the pictures I’m using Romanesco, zucchini, and bell peppers. I roast them for maybe 20 minutes at 415 degrees with just some olive oil, salt, and pepper.

2. Meanwhile, heat some sauce in a saucepan until it is lightly simmering. This is where you really want to go for quality. I know you can make your own sauce of course, but this is for an easy weeknight meal. In my opinion, Rao’s Arrabbiata (which is like a spicy marinara) is the best of the best. They sell it at most groceries, at least where I live.

3. Slice and cook some type of sausage—it can be vegetarian “sausage” links, chicken sausage, regular Italian sausage, whatever. Lots of options for every diet at most grocery stores.

4. Once the vegetables are roasted, put them on a plate and cover with the hot Arrabbiata sauce (however much you like).

5. Add the cooked sausage on the top.

6. Finish it off with a squeeze of lemon, drizzle of olive oil, and some flaky sea salt.

I don’t know why, but this is such a satisfying, filling, & delicious meal to me. It’s way more simplified than what I normally cook, but it’s so nice to be able to throw it together really easily. I also feel like I’m getting tons of veggies and enjoying the comfort of a big bowl of pasta, but without the heaviness and tiredness that can come with digesting a bunch of carbs.

Enjoy!!

My Everything-But-The-Kitchen-Sink Bowls!

If you follow me on Instagram and watch my stories from time to time, you have probably seen that I make a LOT of our meals in bowls! I have loved cooking for a long time but being a newlywed has changed up the way I cook and plan meals (we didn’t live together before we got engaged). Grace loves hearty, healthy food. When I lived alone my go-to meals would often be soups, salads, and sometimes casseroles, but since cooking for two I have needed to make meals that are a little heartier. Grace also loves a lot of different textures and flavors together in one meal.

Enter: BOWLS! Let me explain. Probably at least one night a week our dinner is some kind of fill-in-the-blank “bowl.” A few examples are buffalo cauliflower bowls, homemade “poke” bowls (I use cooked tuna), garden veggie bowls, savory oatmeal bowls, and more. Basically, I take a shallow bowl and fill it with some kind of starch or carb, lots of veggies, protein like tuna, nuts, or crumbled feta cheese, and top it off with a homemade sauce or dressing, flaky sea salt, sesame seeds, green onions, or whatever I feel like. These are such easy, comforting, and healthy weeknight meals. They also make good lunches. Sometimes the bowls are planned out with a theme (like the buffalo cauliflower bowls I’ll show below), but more often than not, they’re everything-but-the-kitchen-sink bowls with just whatever we have on hand thrown in! I also love a one-dish meal because of how easy it is to make and clean up. Here are some of my fav bowls I’ve made:

Base: warm sushi rice. Topped with: tuna (from a can. Yep, so easy), Trader Joe’s spiced pecans, thinly sliced radish, avocado, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, green onion, and black and white sesame seeds sprinkled on top. After I took this picture, I added a homemade sauce that was a mixture of soy sauce, rice vinegar, and ground ginger.

Base: you can’t really see it in this photo, but the base is oatmeal! Making unsweetened oatmeal and using it as a base for savory foods is sooo good and satisfying. If you’ve never tried savory oats, definitely try it! It’s a super healthy option for the carb portion of your bowl. Topped with: avocado, watermelon radish, plain greek yogurt sprinkled with dried herbs, grape tomatoes, green onion, and dried beet chips. I actually didn’t put a sauce on this one, but I added a generous dash of my favorite flaky sea salt.

This is more of a salad than a “bowl,” but it’s packed with so much good stuff I consider it in the same family. Base: butter lettuce. Topped with: feta cheese, cashews, raw chopped green beans, chopped mini sweet peppers, grape tomatoes, and peeled and chopped Persian cucumber. I dressed it with my go-to homemade dressing: a glug of olive oil, a tablespoon or two of white vinegar, 1-2 teaspoons of Dijon mustard, some salt and pepper, and a big squeeze of lemon juice from our lemon tree (I don’t measure anything out but this is the basic recipe).

This one is super simple and so good. Cooked rotini pasta, grape tomatoes, chickpeas, feta cheese, raw green beans, cucumbers spears, whole endives, my go-to dressing (typed out above), and a lemon wedge from our tree.

This one is a recent favorite in our house. Base: warm rice. Topped with: baked buffalo cauliflower and chickpeas, cucumbers (I’ve also added green beans and grape tomatoes). The sauces are a semi-homemade ranch “drizzle” and buffalo sauce. I say semi-homemade because I use Follow Your Heart brand vegan ranch dressing for the sauce, but I add in some vegan mayo, white vinegar, and a ton of chopped fresh dill to thin it out and make it a little lighter (and tastier, to me). The buffalo cauliflower is made by taking fresh cauliflower florets and breading them in a mixture of almond milk, flour, and buffalo sauce, then coating in panko crumbs. I also add in some chickpeas to the buffalo sauce mix but I don’t coat them in panko. I then bake them for about 20 minutes (turning once). They are the crispiest, tasty little faux-chicken buffalo bites. The consistency is more like popcorn shrimp than chicken. An extra drizzle of buffalo sauce at the end really gives it that flavor. YUM!

This is just a simple protein and veggie bowl, with sugar snap peas, grape tomatoes, tuna, butter lettuce, feta cheese, and sliced radish. And some delicious summer peaches on the side :)

As you can see, these bowls can range from more elaborate to super simple. I usually find that no matter what I’m craving, it can be made into a bowl. Recently I have been wanting to try the trend of making eggroll in a bowl but with vegan sausage, so that might be coming soon. The possibilities are endless!

I hope this gives you some inspiration for easy meals at home—I’m by no means a master chef but this has been a fun way to feed Grace and myself that we never seem to get sick of!

Naming the Good Stuff No. 6: When Life Hands You LOTS of Lemons

Happy Friday friends! I am loving the flexibility of these “Naming the Good Stuff” posts to write a quick post on Fridays about what’s good, what I’m thankful for, and what’s been on my heart this week. And this week, I’m feeling so very thankful for my lemon tree!

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve probably seen me post stories and pictures about our lemon tree. I just can’t get over what a gift it is! I’ve laughed out loud so many times seeing the huge bags of lemons I’ll pick—I’ve probably picked close to 200 lemons this winter. I can’t believe it. What’s most striking about it, to me, is that I’ve done no work whatsoever to cultivate this lemon tree. It was here when we moved into the house (it was off-season, so I barely noticed it). It doesn’t even really have soil; it’s growing on the edge of our driveway wedged up next to a fence. The weather has been all over the place this year in LA—a super dry, hot summer, followed by an incredibly rainy winter. Smoke has filled the air from fires across our county. And yet, this lemon tree just keeps on making lemons.

And we’re not talking scrawny, scrappy lemons. These are huge, beautiful, juicy, better-than-grocery-store lemons! The smell is intoxicating right when you pick them (also, I’ve learned, the branches are spiky and getting cut with one feels like you’ve had lemon juice poured into a wound. But worth it). I would honestly say that this lemon tree is one of the top 10 things I’ve been grateful for this winter. And it’s taught me a few poignant lessons.

First, radical generosity. We didn’t plant this lemon tree. We did nothing to earn it. And yet, it just keeps making lemons for us, and I’m overwhelmed with what a generous gift it is. There have been so many lemons that I’ve had to come up with new and creative ways to use them. THAT is radical generosity—giving not just enough, but in abundance.

Second, rekindling childlike wonder. I have felt such magic seeing lemons ripen seemingly overnight, climbing in the branches of the lemon tree (yes . . . it’s so big there are lemons I can’t even reach!), and reflecting on how this amazing plant came to be. From ONE little lemon seed—the tiny things I fish out of a lemon slice before squeezing it into my tea—this tree grew. Big enough that birds perch in its branches.

And third, simply gratitude and balance. The funny thing is, we’ve lived in this house for two winters now and this is the first one that I’ve enjoyed the lemon tree. Last year, I was so busy and juggling WAY too much, and I probably got a handful of lemons all winter and the rest fell on the ground and rotted. I’m by no means an expert on achieving balance, but right now, I feel pretty good about it :)

Here are some of the fun things I’ve done with my lemons!

Used them in all kinds of cooking (soups, roasts, sheet pan dinners, salads, etc.):

Gifted bags upon bags of them to friends:

Made preserved lemons (kind of like dry-pickling lemons in salt, sugar, garlic, and paprika, turns them into an AMAZING pickled pantry staple):

And made sheet pan roast dinners using the preserved slices:

And last but not least, made my lemon bars!

Thank you, lemon tree.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

Savory Cocktail Series: "Roman Holiday"

I’m back with the second installment of my savory cocktail series! If you missed the first one, check out the “Bullshy” here. This series is all about inventing and highlighting savory, umami drinks, which are majorly underrated and underutilized in my opinion.

Today’s drink is named Roman Holiday because of the Italian flavors that make it up, but the foreign (English) spirit—gin—involved, evoking an Englander on holiday in Rome. The ingredients are simple. All that’s in it is included in the next picture below, except the ice, salt for the rim, and club soda.

And making it is pretty simple too. All I did for mine was muddle some basil and cherry tomatoes with some lemon juice in a cocktail shaker, then add 1.5 oz of gin and a couple of generous dashes of balsalmic vinegar. The vinegar is really what gives the drink its signature flavor. After shaking everything up, I strained it into a coup glass, added some cubed ice, and topped with club soda. I used a salted rim on my glass and I think it was the perfect finishing touch.

And that’s it! This kind of tasted like a caprese salad was born in a gin distillery, and I loved it. I think it’s simple and pretty in a coup glass, but it could work in a low ball glass too.

Enjoy!

Savory Cocktail Series: the "Bullshy"

Welcome to a new series on Have Dog, Will Drive! Honestly, this is pretty random and I have no idea whether people will be interested in reading this, but I've decided to do a series on savory cocktails (that I'm inventing and/or adapting). A Bloody Mary is my favorite drink--I used to drink Bloody Mary mix out of a can (without vodka!) during class in law school. Something about a savory, umami drink is just so much more appealing to me than a sugary sweet cocktail. A snack in your drink, a drink in your snack. YUM.

But, there are a zillion sweet cocktail recipes out there, while savory ones are SO rare. There's the Bloody Mary (and many variations thereof), a dirty martini, and . . . that's about it. Recently I was musing about this and decided to make up some of my own! I think the Bloody Mary will always be queen above all others, but I'm pretty excited about some of the ideas I have for different savory/salty cocktails.

Today's drink is heavily inspired by what used to be a very common cocktail in the 1950s and 1960s. The original was known as a Bullshot, and although I've never seen it on a cocktail menu in my life, it was apparently very popular for a time. There are some interesting articles about it here and here. The Bullshot gets its name because it's traditionally made with beef broth. The basic recipe is just beef broth, vodka, and a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce and hot sauce. 

For my first attempt at bringing to life a savory cocktail, I decided to try to make a vegetarian twist on the Bullshot, which I’m calling the Bullshy as a play on the original (actually, Grace came up with the name). It’s extremely simple to make.

I put three parts organic vegetable broth and one part vodka in a cocktail shaker, along with a few dashes of worcestershire sauce, a splash of shoyu sauce, and a squeeze of lime.

Next, just shake, pour into a rocks glass over cubed ice, and garnish with a green onion. I cracked some fresh ground pepper on top and am happy to say it was delish!

I think what I love about this drink are its endless possibilities. Some variations you could try:

• Use homemade broth-I’m sure it would be 100x yummier

• Use different garnishes (a leek? a carrot? a shishito pepper? a skewer of all of the above?!)

• Add hot sauce for a spicy soup

• Make a green onion or pepper-infused vodka for the base

• Try a salted rim with some flaky Maldon salt

As we’re moving into fall, I’m excited to make this drink again around Thanksgiving for a tasty, savory accompaniment to mashed potatoes and green bean casserole (two of my favs).

Let me know if you are a savory drink lover! I’m excited to come up with new recipes in the coming weeks and share them here :)