Winter turns to summer with the Smitten Kitchen
Ahhhh, January. In my a part of the world, January approach heat, sunny afternoons and cool nights. Winter for us is what spring is for people in cooler climates and it's also when citrus culmination come into season. By now, Florida grapefruit and oranges should be trickling into grocery shops all around the place and we're up to our elbows in them. I'm not complaining. We get the choose of the muddle and most of the specialty citurs fruits that develop here never make it out of Florida. Minneolas, honeybelle tangerines, kumquats, key limes, meyer lemons, sour oranges, blood oranges, clementines, mandarins, and the list goes on. I should live on local citrus fruit and die a happy guy.
A cooking blog I like to read is Smitten Kitchen , written by Deb and Alex Perelman. Deb's a chef's chef and she prepares her delicacies in a 46 square foot kitchen on New York's Upper West Side. I love her take on food. She doesn't believe in fuss or unnecessary complication, she's about flavor and hospitality instead. Her recipes prove beyond a doubt that great food isn't dependent on fancy equipment or posh ingredients. Great food is an attitude as much as anything.
Anyhow, Deb and Alex featured a recipe that I'll be having for lunch today. I'll can help you know how it goes. Here's the recipe.
Mixed Citrus Salad with Feta, Onion and Mint
3 to four tablespoons purple onion, cut into tiny bits
4 pieces of citrus, preferably a combination of grapefruits and oranges however use what you can get, and what you like to consume (spoiled by means of the unfold at the store, I used 1 pink grapefruit, 1 cara cara and 1 blood orange, and 1 mineola)
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar or lemon juice
1 teaspoon clean Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper, to flavor
3 to four tablespoons (1.Five oz.) feta cheese, chopped or crumbled
1 tablespoon clean mint, chopped or reduce into tiny slivers
Place your pink onion in the bottom of a medium bowl. Nest a strainer over the bowl.
Prepare your citrus fruits by beveling the stem quit of one, reducing sufficient off which you monitor the pith-free flesh of the fruit. Repeat on the opposite quit. Rest your fruit on one in all its now-flat surface and start slicing the peel and pith off in massive, vertical pieces. You need the fruit?S outdoors to be ?White?-unfastened.
Turn the fruit returned on its aspect and reduce it into 1/4-inch thick wheels, eliminating any seeds and thick white stem as you do. Place the wheels and any gathered juices from the cutting board inside the strainer over the bowl with onion. Repeat with ultimate citrus fruits. (As the extra juices drip over the bowl, it'll soften the uncooked onion bite.)
Spread the fruit slices out on a platter. Scoop out the onion bits (a slotted spoon or fork does the trick) and sprinkle them over, leaving the juice in the bowl. Whisk one tablespoon of juice (this is all I had amassed) with pink wine vinegar or lemon juice, Dijon and olive oil. Season with salt and freshly cracked black pepper. Drizzle the dressing over the citrus, sprinkle with feta and mint, modify salt and pepper to flavor, serve right now and daydream of hotter locations.
Recipe and photographs from Smitten Kitchen