Cooking with Colwin: Green Sauce

This chapter is called, "Feeding the Fussy." Colwin advocates generous care for people's food restrictions after roundly ridiculing them.

She's delightful: "I will never eat fish eyeballs, and I do not want to taste anything commonly kept as a house pet, but otherwise I am a cinch to feed. ... I do not keep kosher and, therefore, am a kind of universal recipient--the O Positive for hostesses. I can be fed in combination with anyone." (I don't mean to brag, but Norleans said the same thing about me the other day, just using different words.)

She writes, "Vegetarians ... are enough to drive anyone crazy. Like Protestants, they come in a number of denominations. Lactovegetarians will eat dairy, eggs and usually fish, but some lactovegetarians will not eat fish. Vegans will not eat dairy products or eggs or fish. And some people say they are vegetarians when they mean they do not eat red meat, leading you to realize that for some people chicken is a vegetable."

So Laurie proposes a recipe for Vegetables and Green Sauce that works for the fussiest of eaters.

Green Sauce:

Cut the stems from a bunch of watercress--serve the tops with the steamed vegetables--and blend with the green parts of four scallions, a tablespoon of Dijon mustard, half a cup of olive oil, freshly ground pepper, a chopped clove of garlic and the juice of half a lemon.

I edited this quite a lot--when I asked if there was watercress at the grocery store, the man helping me said, "We don't have them," which made me think he didn't even know what watercress was. Instead, I used spinach. I don't think it's a replacement, but it is the sort of thing you can make pesto out of, and this seemed a bit like pesto. I didn't have a measuring spoon, so I just used a normal spoon to measure the mustard--I have a feeling that I added too much.

I ate the sauce on top of broccoli mixed with brussel sprouts (probably not the best color choice). Colwin says you can eat it with anything--asparagus, snow peas, string beans, zucchini, yellow squash. I might say anything except brussel sprouts.

The result was good--something like a dressing for a cooked salad, tangy and spicy and light and olive-y. Although perhaps not highly ranked for aesthetics.

Next up: Chicken with Chicken Glaze. Because the name is too good to be true. The only better thing is Hot Ham Water.