Alice Zaslavsky’s joyful way with vegetables can’t help but draw you in. Her recipes strike a rare balance — as easygoing and enticing as they are educational, which isn't surprising, given Zaslavsky's background. The award-winning Australian author and broadcaster used to be a middle-school teacher.
In her fourth cookbook, Salad for Days (Murdoch Books), Zaslavsky takes her veg-loving ways to a natural place. Quoting 1990s-era Homer Simpson, she acknowledges that salads haven’t always gotten the respect they deserve. But times have changed. “As a global force of eaters, I think we're ready for more salads.”
Read the interview, and don't miss the three recipes Zaslavsky shared from Salad for Days. First, an Aussie spin on a dish from her native Georgia, barbecued adjapsandal with adjika yogurt dressing.
Traditionally, adjapsandal is a vegetable stew or casserole similar to a ratatouille or a caponata but with more fresh herbs. For her modernized version, Zaslavsky throws the vegetables on the barbie instead.
"That salad is the encapsulation of where I'm from, who I am and where I'm going because the ingredients in it are universal. Those nightshades are everywhere, which means that everyone can make it. The flavours are from the place of my birth. I can taste them on my tongue as I tell you about them, but the execution of it is so different to how you would imagine it being made in Georgia."
Australians love a barbecue (one of the many things our countries have in common). And in the summer, you don't want to keep an eye on something bubbling on the stove, Zaslavsky highlights. You want it on the grill, which gives the vegetables a nice char. And then there's the adjika.
"Adjika is a real entry point for people to make Georgian food without necessarily having the ingredients they need because you're just using roasted peppers from the supermarket or the deli section, and you're using spices you probably already have."
The second recipe, yampers (camper's jacket yams, pictured), is a favourite in Zaslavsky's household. They make it every couple of weeks because her six-year-old daughter, Hazel (also pictured), loves it. "That salad is my family."
It's also a recipe that encapsulates everything Zaslavsky tried to convey in the book. "No. 1, it was a, 'We've got these ingredients in the fridge, what the heck can we make with them? I'm just going to make something up.' It was literally that, and it's a unicorn recipe, which is my favourite kind. There is nothing like that on the internet, which makes me so happy."
She sees it as epitomizing why, currently, AI can't do what recipe developers do because it's the result of so much lived experience.
"I've baked the sweet potatoes the way you would bake jacket potatoes to load up and then loaded it up with the stuff that I would put in when I was a kid, like sweet corn and sour cream and chives — delish. And then, how do you balance that warmth and richness? Well, you put a slaw with it, of course, because then you get the crunch, and you get the sweetness."
Lastly, we have a monochromatic wonder: Swiss chard and broccoli tumble with herby avocado dressing — Zaslavsky's play on a green goddess. "That is a flavour-packed salad. I wanted it to be 50 shades of green, and that salad was very much visual as much as textural."
Zaslavsky takes the rawness off the broccoli and fennel by pouring boiling water over them in a colander and softens the Swiss chard with a massage. Halved green grapes are the perfect finishing touch.
"The pop of a green grape in a salad is like a cherry tomato. People need to be putting more grapes in salads," she says.
"You get those sweet little pops, then the slight bitterness and crunch from the broccoli, and then the way the (Swiss chard) leaves wrap everything around is a bit noodly. So it feels really substantial, and then you've got that avocado green goddess that's just so more-ish. You're going to want to put that on everything. It's delicious."
Photo by Rochelle Eagle (Salad for Days, Murdoch Books)
