We could all use a little inspiration for dinner, even Ali Slagle, who dinner dreams. In “Dinner Is Served,” he asks his colleagues about a night when they somehow transformed the ingredients into a dinner with all this life.
This Month’s Issue: More than anyone else, cookbook author and recipe creator Hetty Lui McKinnon has provided home cooks with joyful, comforting, and sometimes surprising ways to cook vegetables. We hit the jackpot with her latest book, tender heartone of Eater’s Best Spring Books—weaves stories of his father’s days working at a wholesale farmer’s market through recipes for his 22 favorite fruits and vegetables. On any given night, probably more than one gets a seat at her table.
Salads are very much my soul food. I have an entire career built basically around the foundation of loving plant-based salads. Last night, I made a recipe that I have actually been making for most of my adult life. I think you really only need to do it once to get ingrained in your brain how to do it and how delicious it is.
It’s basically a cucumber and tomato salad served on top of a slice of toasted sourdough or other bread. On top of the salad is halloumi and then on top is some tzatziki (the Greek yogurt sauce). The dish itself came from a restaurant in Sydney. where I used to eat lunch when I was working in public relations many decades ago. The actual recipe was included in my first Community book, which I wrote a decade ago, but now I don’t really use the recipe when making it for my family. Just free spin and wing it.
First I make tzatziki. Of course, you can buy one if it’s easy for you. But I usually grate two Persian cucumbers if they are small; if they are bigger you can use only one. Squeeze out all the liquid so there is not too much liquid left. Then I add that to the Greek yogurt, add some dried mint or you can use fresh mint as well. I grate a small garlic clove and then I add a little bit of extra virgin olive oil, and then my little trick is to add a little bit of sweetener. These days I don’t eat honey as much or at all, so I sweeten it with a teaspoon of maple syrup. Then you season it really well with salt and black pepper and that’s basically your tzatziki. And of course, as I said before, you can only buy tzatziki. It’s much easier.
So next I move on to the salad. I cut about six Roma tomatoes into cubes and then cut about four Persian cucumbers into shapes similar in size to the tomatoes and then added some black kalamata olives. You can really use whatever olives you have, some grated garlic (one grated garlic clove) and then some fresh oregano and mint leaves. Of course, then I dress it with quite a bit of olive oil, about a quarter cup, maybe a little more, and also a little bit of red wine vinegar just to give it a little tartness, a teaspoon or two. Of course we need to season very well with sea salt and black pepper and then the salad is ready.
The next step is to cut the halloumi into 5mm slices… how many inches is that? Maybe it’s a ¼ inch slice of halloumi. It can be said that I have been a recipe developer for a long time since I measure the thickness of my halloumi. Heat a frying pan over medium heat, wait until it gets very hot, then add a little olive oil and fry the halloumi on each side, for about a minute until it is well browned.
The last step is to simply put it together. I receive my slices of bread, sourdough or ciabatta… something crunchy. I usually rub the pieces of bread with a clove of garlic and then give them a quick toast in my skillet so they get those nice charred marks, but you don’t really have to do that: you can serve this on a regular plate. piece of bread that you just cut. What I like about not toasting it is that the bread gets soggy. Soggy isn’t normally something that’s very glamorous in food, but it’s incredibly cheery in this salad when you have the soggy bread on the bottom to soak up all the juices from the tomatoes, cucumbers, and olive oil.
So you put the bread on the bottom of the plate, put a pile of your tomato-cucumber mixture on top of the bread, then top the salad with a few slices of halloumi, then spoon or tablespoon over some of the tzatziki. and then you drizzle with more olive oil, more ground pepper and that was our dinner last night.
Even though it’s actually bread with salad, cheese, and sauce, I call it a salad because I tend to make a lot of meals for some reason. I love their scrambled nature and the fact that they can be eaten at room temperature means I can prepare ahead of time and do a lot of legwork earlier in the day.
Ali Slagle is a recipe developer, stylist, and most important of all, a home cook. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Washington Postand her cookbook is called I Dream About Dinner (So You Don’t Have To): Low Effort, High Reward Recipes.
Daniela Jordan-Villaveces is a creative director and illustrator. She was born in Bogotá and raised between Colombia, the Netherlands and the US She currently lives in sunny Los Angeles with her husband, her son Lou, two kittens and a puppy.
