Pineapple: Caribbean Pineapple and Oranges

Photo by Danielle Hartman-Semtry

This is another fruit salad that uses a glaze and orange segments like Glazed Citrus and Raspberries. This time the glaze is lighter and accented with fresh ginger and coconut. The amount of ginger in this recipe can be cut back to make the glaze mild. The fruit and ginger can be cut ahead of time but the glaze and coconut should be added at the end.

Cabbage: Sesame Noodle Salad

Photo by Emily Mills

This dish is one of my favorite things to bring to potlucks because it can be served hot, cold, or room temperature. It's also vegan and not spicy so a large number of people can eat it. (You could even switch to rice noodles and tamari instead of soy sauce to make this gluten-free). The best thing about this type of dish is that you can make it in stages rather than trying to time out cooking a bunch of vegetables that take wildly different amounts of heat and caramelization. Just put on music or an episode of True Blood and don't stress out about doing too many things at one time.

Come eat potatoes and support tenant rights in Madison!

Come see me in the Iron Chef Cook-off to benefit the Tenant Resource Center.  It's happening 5-7 pm on March 25th at the Brink Lounge. A $25 donation benefits the Housing Crisis Fund.   I'm in the Potato Battle and going against last year's champions,  Michael and Corey Jacob. There are also battles with citrus, curry, and beans. Now, I'm not ultra competitive, but I really would like to vanquish my competition here. I'm going to play by the rules of Iron Chef here and make only my own recipes and use only proper potatoes. In my opinion, sweet potatoes would be cheating since they're in an entirely different botanical family than potatoes, so I'll stick only to varieties of "real potato" potatoes. Cooking won't happen on-site, so a challenge will be to make dishes that can survive minimal heating or prep work at the venue. I'll also have to think of ways to make some parts of the dishes ahead of time given the number of people expected and personal time constraints. I haven't decided exactly what I'm making, but I have ideas to start testing out next week. I'll put the best recipes up here after the event.