Lathi kai Xethe (Greek Salad Dressing) Greece….page 116
It is pretty depressing cooking for one. And sometimes the math is just too difficult….dividing an egg by eight or figuring out how to add 1/32 of a teaspoon. So while my sous chef is in Haiti, I thought I would try to dive into the condiment section of Extending the Table. This dressing was INCREDIBLE! A combination of : red wine vinegar, salt, pepper, sugar, oregano, dry mustard, garlic, lemon juice and olive oil. I made a nice salad with greens, feta and tomatoes. Let me just take a moment and tell you how exciting I find the lettuce selection here in London. I just bought a normal bag of lettuce only to get it home and find that it was a combination of four excitingly names lettuces (lettuci?): Green oak leaf, frisee, radicchio and lambs lettuce!
Whoa...it looks like ALOT of feta! I had totally not noticed that at the time!
I also spent my day doing some reconnaissance work on ingredients. I have some tricky recipes in my future – things you can’t just whip together at the last moment. And yes, I know, I could cheat and just drop ingredients that are hard to find but what fun would that be? So today I toured around a few local shops with two lists in my pocket – list of vegetables I need to start identifying when I see them and list of ingredients that if/when I see them, I should buy them immediately.
List of vegetables: endive, kale, red cabbage, okra, mung beans, galangal, leeks, lemon grass, soybeans in the pod, pigeon peas, hominy.
Things to buy immediately if I see them: goat meat, venison, bulk sesame seeds, dried Chinese black mushrooms, saffron, crushed almonds, mace, cardamom pods, bean thread vermicelli.
Number of items bought? Zero.
Ok, actually I saw a great deal on Marks and Spencer yogurt which I am sort of addicted to, so I did buy three pots of this. But other than that? Zero. Heading to Chinatown tomorrow….
Emily's Extending the Table Experiment 
Emily,
I found dried hominy in a store on turnpike lane. As you walk to church it is on the left hand side of turnpike lane. It is quite a large store with fresh stuff under a large overhand outside. Inside it has tons of dried beans etc and it did have dried hominy. (it also had A & W rootbeer at one time but after we bought it he said he was never bringin it in again as no one else bought it!)
By: Kathy on March 16, 2010
at 12:16 pm
Oh.. and soybeans in the pod I found at the Japanese store near to where the roads converge at the food of All Pally. (near to the famers market). I think that they were frozen.
By: Kathy on March 16, 2010
at 12:18 pm