Salad for Days | Alice Zaslavsky

Suzy Chase:                   When two podcasts collide, magic happens. Welcome to Dinner Party, the podcast where I bring together my two hit shows, Cookery by the Book and Decorating by the Book around here. We're all about cooking, sharing stories behind recipes, and creating a cozy home. I'm your host, Suzy Chase, a West Village wife, mom and homecook. Inspired by Martha Stewart trying to live in a Nora Ephron movie, surrounded by toile, plaid, cookbooks, decorating books and magazines, cooking in my galley kitchen and living my best life in my darling New York City apartment in the cutest neighborhood in the city, the West Village. So come hang out and let's get into the show.

Alice Zaslavsky:             Good day. I'm Alice Zaslavsky and my new book is Salad for Days: Breezy Ways with Veg All Year Round.

Suzy Chase:                   It's springtime here in the US and lucky for us, your fourth cookbook is rooted in seasonality. So tell me what's your favorite spring salad ingredient That doesn't get enough love.

Alice Zaslavsky:             I think any kind of bean or pea, this is the time of year where spring peas, snow peas, sugar snap peas and beans are at their best. So I really think that that is where you should be heading and should always be grabbing, whether you're making stir fries with it or whether you're blanching and popping through a salad like my spring pea with the Palmers and vinegarette. For me that is definitely that sings of spring and I can't pick one, I'm sorry, but I'm going to say as well asparagus because it's got such a short season and here in Australia, Victoria, which is where I'm based, grows 98% of Australia's asparagus. So you can literally be driving through an area called Kuey ru and just watch the asparagus start to spear up because an asparagus spear can sprout up within sort of the hour and just start shooting. You can watch it in real time. It's incredible. So I think that when asparagus is at its best where you're not importing it from another country where you are grabbing it and you can still snap it and it's so sweet and it's so tender and buttery, I think that asparagus gets my vote.

Suzy Chase:                   Okay. So you just mentioned your easy peasy spring salad with parmesan vinegarette, which is on page 86. Tell me about that.

Alice Zaslavsky:             That came about because I think that it's the sort of salad where it definitely loves spring because obviously all of those peas and beans and greens are at their best things like snow pea shoots as well. That's the time where you'll find them. But I think that that parmesan vinaigrette is delicious on anything. So it's almost like that's your wash for anything green. So it's interchangeable. We're thinking about cost of living pressures not just here down under, but everywhere. I'm seeing articles about it in North America as well. So if snow peas are really expensive, but you know that frozen peas are still and they always will be a really cost effective option, you can put frozen peas in this salad. You are more than welcome to do that. So find whatever is most cost effective to you, whether it's string beans or flat beans or maybe there are some peas in your garden that you're using as well. Just it's a collection, a selection of green stuff with this really umami rich, savory vinegarette and thinking about cheese in a vinegarette, I think that for some people can be a bit discombobulating, but actually what it does is it creates a really lovely coating for something that would ordinarily just slip straight off. So it's quite a textural vinaigrette.

Suzy Chase:                   Yeah, we all love parmesan and our vinaigrette. ,

Alice Zaslavsky:             Well normally you would emulsify say with a mustard like a seeded mustard or a dijon. So think of the parmesan in this instance as the emulsification and the suspension in this dressing.

Suzy Chase:                   -So the moment I opened the cookbook, I realized I love the way it feels like physically feels and it's not quite a hard cover and it's not a typical soft cover either. Could you describe the physical design?

Alice Zaslavsky:             The book is a flexi bound, so it is more on the soft cover in terms of price point, but more on the hardcover in terms of its robustness. So I wanted the book to be something that sits on your kitchen bench. I don't want it to be on the cookbook shelf because it's too precious and it's not necessarily just on your coffee table. I want it to get used to the point where it's got a white clean flexi cover, so if you get that Parmesan vinegarette on it, you can clean off the schmutz. It also, and this was by accident and not by design, but I think it was a real serendipity, is that I wanted it to have a texture to it so that it didn't have just a flatness. But what the texture is for want of a better descriptor is it feels like skin.

                                    So the matte aspect, if you sort of hold it with your palm, if you touch it with your palm, it feels like I'm holding your hand. There's a real warmth to it and then it's got this glossy me, which ordinarily I'm not on the cover of my cookbook. So this is the first time where you're getting any of me and the amount of people, Susie, who have said to me, where did you get that photo? Who is that? I'm like, it's me. It's me because the way the light hits my hair, it makes me look a little bit more blonde. I don't ordinarily, I'm oversized t-shirt gal and I've got this form fitting. She's a woman. It's very that cover. So that part's glossy and it really of twinkles in the sunlight, but then the rest of it just has this real lived in warmth and skin and it's ombre, it's peachy ombre. So it feels like tequila, sunrise, and I just think it makes me feel like sunshine even as we come into autumn winter here, down under, it still feels like it brings sunshine back to me.

Suzy Chase:                   How is this cookbook organized?

Alice Zaslavsky:             This cookbook is organized as simply as possible. I think the logic and the user experience is so important in a cookbook. Both my parents work in computer science and information systems organizing information, and I think that that's something that has kind of uploaded into my brain as well because when I write cookbooks, I'm always thinking how are they going to get used? So in praise of veg, which is probably my best known cookbook, is organized by color and it's organized by vegetables. So if you look, you can find the color of the vegetable. And so I knew because this is the companion text to impraise a veg, I knew that it needed to be just as useful and I did beg my publisher to let me make this one color coded as well. And she said, no, Alice, you're not a one trick pony. You need to think differently.

                                    And I realized that actually because there are only 80 recipes in here, I need it to be a lot more simple in the way that I thought about how people would use this cookbook. And so I went right back to basics and simplified it as much as possible. I want people to think it's a warmer day today. So I'm in one section, it's a cooler day today, I'm in another section. If you need something different, if you feel like a creamy dressing or a light and bright or a zippy and zesty, then it also has an index at the front that's kind of like the contents specifically based on dressings. And because there are 80 different dressings for the 80 different salads you will find the dressing that suits you, you will. And if you are more like the sort of person that's trying to use up what's in your crisper, what vegetables are left before you go and shop again, if you have this, then make this section at the back. So I'm a cookbook fiend. I love a cookbook and I love seeing the way that it's organized and I get really excited when somebody is thinking about me when they write a cookbook. So I'm always thinking about my cooks when I'm organizing my cookbooks because I think it makes all the difference, right? It's the difference between it sitting on your shelf and you actually using it and we carry salad for days with us to the shops. That's how useful it is.

Suzy Chase:                   So you say times have changed as to what a salad can be. So how has the role of salad evolved from the side dish to the centerpiece?

Alice Zaslavsky:             I think for a long time, and it is cultural, it depends. So I'm talking in a very kind of Anglo Celtic Western way. The salad was always an afterthought. It was occasionally just window dressing on the plate. In fact, there's a plate here, which is like a joke plate that you can get and it has the salad as part of the ceramic inset for a meat pie company. So the four 20 salad is just literally decoration on the plate and it does not deserve that treatment. In Georgia, which is where I was born, salad is something that we eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and it is part of a spread our supra. So there were always smaller salads and larger salads and it was just an array or a combination of different fruits and vegetables with some kind of dressing. So that's what I want you to think about when you think about a modern salad is that it can be just as simple as two or three ingredients tossed together with something that makes you want to go in for another bite.

                                    Or you can think about salad as the main event, the hero on the table, the thing that everybody's going to be talking about for the next week. So there are salads in this book that are very much not an afterthought, they're a forethought, they're something that you're really looking forward to making again, but they're smaller. But then there are other salads which are very much a whole roasted cauliflower on a rice salad that is just such a heavenly vegetarian option. When you've got people coming over that are plant-based eaters that are sick of eating a risotto, this is going to be something that they're going to love.

Suzy Chase:                   So you just mentioned breakfast, you can have salad for breakfast, and that was a huge new idea that I came away from your cookbook with. So tell me about your relaxed chopped salad on page 80 and the story of traveling with your parents.

Alice Zaslavsky:             Have you started to do a breakfast salad yet? I think that will make me so happy to know that you've actually done it.

Suzy Chase:                   I haven't started yet because I've been reading your cookbook, so I'll start tomorrow.

Alice Zaslavsky:             Oh, I love it. Okay. So I think that that's when I know that you have opened your heart and mind to salad as something new for my family. We've always got breakfast salad on the table at the start of the day, and it's just as simple as tomatoes, cucumbers, capsicumaig, maybe some Spanish onion. If you don't have a breakfast meeting or if you're not seeing anyone until about midday, then you can put onion in there, maybe a soft herb. If I've got dill or mint or parsley or coriander handy, it's tro handy, then that can go in as well. But the key to it is that you're starting the day with color and with vibrant ingredients because what you'll find if you do put a breakfast salad on your spread is that you are arming your body with the vibrancy and the vigor and the vibration of veg first thing in the morning.

                                    And it makes such a difference to your day. Because I think sometimes when your breakfast is brown and white and beige, then yes, it's coating your kishkas, but it's not actually giving you that rainbow that you need to get to lunch in a really happy, joyful way. And I think that breakfast salad is exactly what everybody needs because a lot of the world are not getting their five a day and it's because they're waiting till dinner to eat their vegetables. Whereas you can start at breakfast and just not stop and you'll feel better for it. I guarantee you, I guarantee you, and I call it a relaxed chopped salad because I'm very relaxed with how you chop it. Your skills can be very minimal, your knife can be very blunt. And when I was traveling with my parents, which I did do, my parents are both professors, they're academics and they went to a lot of conferences and they just take me along.

                                    It was easier than getting me babysitting for a month at a time. So I would travel road trip through Europe or through Asia and they would have a camping knife and a dodgy little chopping board. And the first thing we would do when we'd land in a place was we would go to the local, either market or supermarket or green grocer, and we would get those ingredients, tomatoes, a cucumber, a capsicum and some olive oil or sunflower oil depending on where we were. And we would get it back to the service department or hotel room, whatever it was. We had the skills, we had the stuff, and we would start our day with that. So even if the breakfast buffet was included, the relaxed chopped salad was always there. And then we would spend the whole day sightseeing. And people ask me, Alice, how do you have so much energy? How do you get it all done? And I will always say it's the veg. I'm living life on the veg. And it starts with the relaxed chopped salad for breakfast. It will change your life, Susie, you need to report back.

Suzy Chase:                   So you talk about effort to return. What does that mean in terms of this cookbook?

Alice Zaslavsky:             I'm a very lazy cook, so I'm always thinking about what I can do with minimal effort, minimal fuss to get the highest return and the highest flavor out of what I cook. So whether that means there are a few things that I do. So number one, I'm always thinking, can this be done in a more efficient way? Can I reuse what I've already got going on rather than doing extra work that I don't need to do and also letting other people do the work. That means relying on artisanal produce or having a really great chili oil in the fridge that I know is already fantastic and that can add extra oomph and kick to my food. Or it could be having a fantastic marmalade that I know is going to go really well in my sunshine and rainbow salad. I've got a marmalade dressing in there.

                                    I'm not making that marmalade. I'm buying a really great marmalade from a fantastic jam maker, and that's my ticket to flavor town. So I think that always when you are looking at a recipe, and I do this myself when I look at a recipe, I'm asking myself, is the effort to return ratio at a good point for me? And I actually think that in a cookbook, it starts with making sure there's a picture who is a recipe. If we don't know what it looks like, there is no, there's no impetus. So I had to, when my publisher and I Jane were talking about this book, we knew that every recipe needed a food on plate. And I think the reason that that doesn't happen is because it costs money and it is effort for the photo shoot to make sure that every recipe has a picture and how many different bean salads can there possibly be. Of course people could imagine what a bean salad looks like. No, they can't and they don't want to. They want to see it. We want to see it because then what that does is it dangles the little carrot pun always intended that this salad is worth making and that the effort is worth the return.

Suzy Chase:                   So you give us some simple steps to stick the landing. One thing I don't often think about in my salads are spices. Herbs, yes, but spices, no. So talk a little bit about that.

Alice Zaslavsky:             Well, I think that again, in Georgian cuisine, spices are paramount and it's because we are on the spice trail. Georgia is the crossroads of Europe and Asia, and it's bang, smack, bang on the spice trail. So all of those spices that you experience in Northern Indian cooking across the Middle East, you'll find in Georgian cuisine. And so adding spices, especially for the cooler days, salads, spices have such terrific Ayurvedic remedial medicinal aspect, functional benefits. So something like a turmeric or a ginger for grounding or a cumin to accentuate the flavor of an orange vegetable like a pumpkin or a carrot. It can revitalize and reinvigorate. So even if you've got a warm roasted vegetable salad that you always make, adding a spice, a ground spice or a seeded spice depending on what you're making, can really add dimension and depth to the flavor of it and think about things that go together.

                                    So for example, if I'm adding cilantro, so fresh coriander leaves, then I'm certainly wondering could this salad have ground coriander? In Georgian cuisine, we have ground coriander seed as well as fresh coriander through cilantro, through our salads. So how can I build that? The same goes with fennel, use the fennel bulb, use the fennel fronds, use the fennel seeds and make a delicious fennel salad. There's a glorious chickpea and fennel salad in the book that's like, and I think that what makes it is the addition of the fennel seeds because it just adds and accentuates that a nice kind of licorices that fennel naturally has because all of those things, if they grow together, they go together. And that is even more true when it comes to the spices.

Suzy Chase:                   So you also tell us, always add an allium. What are some different ways we can cut an onion for salads?

Alice Zaslavsky:             Alliums are very important. An onion makes or breaks a salad if you don't have an onion or a spring onion or a shallot, or I'm doing my best to speak the North American language, Susie, I hope I'm doing well. No, you're doing really, depending on the way that you cut the onion, it can give you a totally different mouthfeel, but it can also accelerate how quickly the dressing absorbs. So if you want a dressing to absorb really quickly, then you are cutting the onion against the grain, cut the onion from root to tip, so you're keeping the root on because it makes it easier to slice. And then if you want the dressing to absorb quickly, you're cutting against the grain if you want it to absorb as quickly as possible. And also for the onion to really kind of melt into the salad, your dicing finally dicing little brunoise action. However, onions are great for crunch and pop. So if you want to keep the shape of the onion and if you want to keep the texture of the onion, and if you want to keep the salad fresh for as long as possible, you are cutting with the grain and the onion will actually tell you where it wants you to cut it, because there's almost like little lines, little slice lines on the onion itself. You are right. So follow the onion. The onion tells you what it wants.

Suzy Chase:                   So you tell us, eating with the season is easy when salad isn't involved. And I'd love for you to describe a couple of recipes, a couple of more recipes. The first is on page 36, long and short beans with a very sharp vinaigrette. So tell me about the flavor profile of this recipe.

Alice Zaslavsky:             I made that recipe a couple of days ago because it's such a good one to bring to dinner parties as a little bringer plate because it holds very well long beans. So green beans, which again, effort to return rather than using a bean stringer or anything like that, you're literally just taking off the top. You are snapping it in half, and that's the long bean, that's the long bean processed and it's just blanched. And then the short bean is just from a tin. So canned beans, I used butter beans, but you could use kidney beans, you could use a five bean mix if you want to whatever you've got in the pantry. And then because those beans, so the green beans have crunch, the tinned beans are creamy, you need something really sharp to cut through both of those. So the vinegarette is from an acid perspective, it's probably more like half and half acid to oil, where ordinarily you would do a one third, two third vinegar to oil.

                                    So it's really, really sharp. It's really tangy and peon and because it's sharp, what acid does for our palette is that it makes you want to go back in for another bite. So this is a really moorish salad in how much you want to eat it. And it's also really adaptable because the other day when I made it, I made the vinaigrette sharp, but I actually kind of went half and half with another salad in the book, which is the first salad in the cooler days, the calamari, it's like a shell pasta salad with my pg paste. I made the calamari salad and then I still had half the pg paste. I'm very generous in how much dressing you're making because I like to think if you've made a dressing, then you will have maybe half a dressing left and then you'll make another salad with that.

                                    That's kind of what I'm thinking. If you want to use the whole dressing, you're more than welcome because I had this pg paste, I went, you know what? I'm going to use that as the base of my long and short with my very sharp, and then I'm just going to really zing up my vinegarette and add acid to that pg. So it was kind of like a real mashup and you can tell I'm a riffer, I write these recipes and then I rewrite the recipes in my head and do something else. That to me is the utmost compliment. If you make one of my recipes and you say, I made this, but I riffed on it or I made this, but I used a different ingredient here, or I changed the dressing to soup my family, that is music to my ears. Some recipe writers get really tizzy when people change what they've made, but you can change everything. Just don't email me then and say, oh, it didn't work that the owner selling buyer beware. You can change everything. I'm proud of you, but if it doesn't work, it's no longer my recipe.

Suzy Chase:                   Moving on to page 64, your honeydew carpaccio caught my eye.

Alice Zaslavsky:             Yes, yes. Because a cappaccio ordinarily would be meat, a beef cappaccio, or maybe you do a tuna cappaccio or kingfish, whatever, but why not use melon? Melon is so firm, it's quite meaty actually. And so you could use honeydew for this. So you could use peel to sao or rock melon cantaloupe. You could even use watermelon if you wanted to. I just would with watermelon. That dressing is going on right before you serve it, and that's getting eaten right away because watermelon is a really naughty ingredient. It just wets itself as soon as you add oil to it. That's why I stick to kind of the firmer melons and you slice them really, really finely. And then on goes this cilantro rich dressing kind of like, I would call it a bit salsa, but it's a coriander, so cilantro, salsa, verde, and that's got a bit of heat to it as well.

                                    In terms of the flavor profile, I would say that's more of a Southeast Asian flavor profile. And because Australia, we are part of Asia and we've got a really big influence of Southeast Asian cooking in our food. So we've probably got the ingredients like fish sauce. We've probably got limes in our fruit bowl as much as we've got lemons. So this is a dressing that kind of encapsulates that aspect of what living in this country has done. For my palate, which I've got a Georgian kind of with the spices and the spice trail and that part of, and even Europe and Asia, but then I've got Southeast Asia and East Asia and South Asia because of the pantry, the global pantry that we have here in this country as well. And I think that's quite simpatico with the beautiful melting pot that you have over there in North America as well.

Suzy Chase:                   Okay. Here's the big question. Serious Eats recommends tossing salad with clean hands. What are your thoughts, dying to know?

Alice Zaslavsky:             Okay, so I would say it's probably not something that I tell you to do in the book, and I can understand why they tell you to do it because you can feel with clean hands, you can feel that the dressing has coated every last vegetable. It's a delicate way to toss. So for more delicate vegetables, tossing with your hands is a terrific option. From a zero waste perspective, you're also getting a bit of a hand moisturized from the oils. Amazing. I think because I've just been filming 50 episodes of a TV show where I get emails from people telling me I'm wearing too many rings or that I need to wash my hands. I probably am not tossing salad with my hands because I just don't need emails. But if you want to do that at home, you are more than welcome. I'm never going to yuck a yum. And there have been times, in fact, when I visit my friend's places and they don't have the tools that I need or the large mixing bowl that I would ordinarily mix my salad in, I might then go in with my hands. It's just easier to maneuver.

Suzy Chase:                   So now for my segment called The Perfect Bite where I ask you to describe the perfect bite of your favorite salad.

Alice Zaslavsky:             So the perfect bite of my favorite salad, it's high summer, so it is peak tomato season. The tomatoes are juicy and sweet. They've come off the vine at my in-laws farm, so they are like sun warm, and I've just cut them because they're smaller. I've cut them into quarters, and then I've got some shiny red capsicumF that I've cut roughly. There's no need to kind of cut it with or against the grain. It's just kind of fork sized and about the same size as the tomato piece. And then I've got some Lebanese cucumber, which you call something else. You call them short cucumbers. I think they're the smaller ones, not the telegraph long ones with no flavor, a cucumber, the smaller it is, the sweeter it'll be unless it's a gerkin. If it's got a soft skin and it's small to medium like's zucchini, you are going to get a better flavor from that than a long telegraph.

                                    So the short cucumber is cut into quarters. Again, it is sweet because it's high summer. If it's not sweet enough, I'm pinch in just like a teeny pinch of sugar just to fake trick the palate into thinking that everything is at its peak and then it's dressed simply with extra virgin olive oil, a squirt of lemon, and maybe there's a soft herb in it. I'm going to put some dill in it because that's what happens when you've got your Eastern Europe adjacent. Oh, and some Spanish onion because you need to add an allium. And I don't have a morning meeting, so I'm going to put all of that on my fork. Crunchy, juicy, sweet, tangy, pecan color, vim vigor vibration. That is my perfect fight. Oh wow.

Suzy Chase:                   So where can we find you on the web, social media, and your television show?

Alice Zaslavsky:             You will find me on all of the socials as Alice in Frames, because I wear specs like Suzy and because I love puns, so exactly like Alice in Chains about Alice in Frames and Alice recipes. If you put that into your search engine, you'll come to my website and there are lots of recipes to try from this book, from other books, just things that I toss together. I've got a newsletter called Good Condiments that you can subscribe to. It's all free and you will find me on the telly. The show is called A Bite to Eat With Alice. It's not yet available in North America, but I invite over familiar faces from all around the world to come and have a meal with me. We cook together, we have a chat, and because we're side by side, something happens where they just share stories that you would otherwise never hear, and we taste delicious food. So if you can't get it, there's still plenty of me to find as Alice in Frames on Instagram and Facebook as well.

Suzy Chase:                   Thanks Alice so much for stopping by and inspiring us to rethink salad.

Alice Zaslavsky:             Oh, Suzy, it is just such a joy to connect with you and I can tell that we are kindred spirits and I'm just going to have to keep writing more books so that we can have more dinner parties.

Suzy Chase:                   Yay. Okay, so where can you listen to the new Dinner Party podcast series? Well, it's on substack suzy chase.substack.com. You can also subscribe to Dinner Party for free on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Additionally, the episodes will be available on both Decorating by the Book and Cookery by the Book. Long story short, you'll be able to listen to it virtually everywhere. Thanks for listening. Bye.