Mixt Salads recipe #4: Field
I misplaced my camera. Not that Field was visually exciting, though it was quite pretty: a salad of pale butter lettuce with contrasting dark stripes of tarragon and a tiny bit of blue cheese. Nice and basic. Again, though, the proportions seemed off. I felt there was too much lettuce, too little cheese, too little oomph, that I have improvised more interesting green salads, that a handful of toasted nuts would have made a huge difference. Andrew Swallow calls for two heads of butter lettuce for four people. I bought one and maybe it was just an extraordinarily large butter lettuce, but we still had far too much. I can't quite get the hang of this book.
I served Field with veggie burgers made from The Frog Commissary Cookbook. These contained garbanzo beans, tahini, vegetables, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, wheat germ, and soy sauce and they were falafel-like and delicious, but again, too soft and crumbly. I'm going to try again and add more . . . more what? What would make these bind better? I share the aversion to using an egg, though I'm not sure why. I will try the recipes suggested by commenters. Thank-you.
After dinner, we watched a mesmerizing documentary on DVD called Sweetgrass about sheepherders in the mountains of Montana. Basically nothing happens and there's no talking but for occasional furious profanity directed at sheep. I highly recommend this movie, but please reread the first three words of the last sentence. I'm not exaggerating and wouldn't want anyone to be disappointed.
Like the black bean burgers from the last post, I think you could grind up some of the beans in the food processor to give you the binder you are looking for. I'm not sure if garbanzo beans would work for this, but cannelini, pinto, a can of veg refried beans in a pinch...
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