Jamie At Home: Episode 11, Winter Salad

Jamie Oliver’s in his garden, and it looks like a storm is brewing. He says it’s rainy and windy. But despite the dreary weather, Jamie’s going to pick through whatever vegetables he has in his garden to make some wicked salads. Ooops, he almost trips over a planter box as he’s walking away.

Gosh, it’s really windy. I feel like someone should tie Jamie down so he doesn’t blow away. He picks some radicchio, treviso (which is the Italian version of radicchio), land cress (which I’ve never heard of but Jamie says it’s watercress that doesn’t grow in the water but the land) and mustard cress, which is his favorite salad of the year.

Roast Carrot and Avocado Salad

Jamie’s out of the wintry weather outside and in his tiny tool shed. He says he’s going to make a salad, but not the typical crunchy salad. He’s going to spice up it, Moroccan style. (Complete recipe at the Food Network Web site here.)

He boiled some organic carrots (they’re the multi-colored ones, also known as heirloom) for about 15 minutes and drained them. While warm, he tosses them with salt, pepper, red chili and cumin. He has this really interesting red glass shaker that he puts everything in and just shakes until it gets ground up. I guess you could use a spice grinder, but that red thing looks cool. Wonder where I can get one?

He adds thyme and garlic to his red smasher and shakes that up more, creating a paste. He adds some olive oil and a swig of vinegar (about a tablespoon and a half) and pours it over his carrots, then places everything in a roasting tray. He cuts a lime and orange in half and places them face down in the tray with the carrots. This will be for his dressing. Everything goes in the oven and bakes for 20 minutes at 350 degrees.

He peeled two avocados and quarters them up to add to the salad. He combines it with the carrots and then works on the dressing using the roasted orange and lime, squeezing out the juice from both. He adds to the juice an equal amount of olive oil and a pinch of salt. He tastes it and decides to add a hint of vinegar.

Making what is pretty much croutons, Jamie grills a slice of bread in a pan and then rips it apart onto his salad. He adds a bunch of greens: radicchio, rocket, beet root leaves. They all go onto the salad with his dressing and he tosses everything together. You’d think he’s done, but no, it keeps going. He adds a spoonful of yogurt (he says you can use sour cream) and then more greens and finally, some hemp seed. Oh, and a drizzle of olive oil. Now he’s done. That’s a big salad.

Amazing Winter Salad

Jamie says he’s going to do something unusual by making a crunchy salad using root greets. First he’s making an unusual dressing, starting off by simmering six garlic cloves in a pint of milk in a saucepan. He’s trying to get them soft, and he says it should take about 10 minutes. He adds some anchovies including the oil from the can into the garlic milk.

Now he starts cutting up a bunch of things, and really he’s trying to get a mix of colors, textures and crunch. Jamie starts with carrots, that he cuts thin and places them in a bunch on a platter. It really looks like he’s making a crudite. Then he cuts a raw beet root (very thin), celery, cauliflower, fennel and a black radish. I’ve never seen a black radish, but since he has a big one, he says to peel it and inside it’s white like a normal radish. So he really defeats the purpose of having a black radish, me thinks. His last vegetable to add to his platter is a celeriac, which Jamie says he has the darndest time to grow in his garden.

For the dressing, he uses a hand blender to puree his garlic milk dressing and he adds more olive oil and some vinegar. You can tell he loves this dressing, which kind of looks like a buttermilk dressing. He pours it into a bowl and places it onto the platter of vegetables. So he says this would be it and you could be done, but he also likes to present it like a normal salad and he throws all the vegetables into a bowl and tosses them with the dressing, which kind of made it look like a soup. The colors of all the vegetables are incredibly beautiful, though. (You can check out the complete recipe here, although what's weird is that the photo on the Food Network site for the recipe doesn't look like the crunchy salad and actually looks like the tuna salad that Jamie's making below. How weird.)

Tuna Ceviche with Herb Shoots

I feel like Jamie’s making dinner because it’s totally dark outside while he’s sitting in his sun room reading to make his next salad with this humongous blue fin tuna that most have cost him a lot. But first he fries up some ginger sticks and garlic slices that he’s going to add to his salad. He fries them up in sunflower oil.

Jamie slices up his tuna, first in half then into very thin slices, placing them almost like a fan around a plate. He adds a handful of sprouts and places them in the middle in a big pile. He says he wants to make the dressing using the Japanese yuzu, which is a citrus that is very hard to find in London, of course. (I think we can find it at the farmers market sometimes in California.) So he’s going to make a citrus dressing to try to match the flavor of the yuzu, so he combines the juices of a Clementine, tangerine, lime and grapefruit. He seasons with salt and he thinks it’s brilliant, very close to the yuzu.

Jamie sprinkles some of the fried ginger on top along with garlic chips, and then finishes it off with his citrus dressing. Now that’s a nice light dinner that should brighten any winter night.

Jamieisms heard in this episode:

Brilliant

Morrocon-vibey.

Mega

Jamie At Home airs on Saturday at 9:30 a.m. on the Food Network. Visit Jamie’s Web site at www.jamieoliver.com. More on the accompanying book for the series here.