What Could Be Mo Rockin than Tagine? Part II

(This is Part II of the series, What could be Mo Rockin than Tagine? For Part I, click here.)

While we waited for the stew to stew, we messed around on the Internet, talked about boys, and watched the latest episode of LOST (do you think Ben time traveled to Tunisia?). I was growing extremely impatient, and caught myself longingly looking at the timer. The smell of the meat and the spices was filling the house and I was ready to eat.

Once the hour had passed, Michele removed the lid covering the tagine. Steam rose out of the pot and filled our olfactory senses. Michele proclaimed, “this is going to be really good!” I concurred. She dumped in some blanched almonds, cilantro, and a mess of dried plums. Earlier, when Michele had commented to me that we would be adding over a pound of prunes to our dish, I joked, "So, does tagine keep you regular?" and Michele replied, "Oh, yes, Moroccans poop a lot. We’re a very regular people."




While the tagine simmered (when would it be ready?!), Michele removed three bright orange Minneola (also known as honeybell) oranges then peeled and chopped them. “What're those for?” I asked. Michele told me that tagine was almost always accompanied by an icy cold salad.


Then she did something totally wacky – she added the chopped oranges to a bowl of cured black olives (rinsed several times), and coated the fruits with a bit of olive oil, paprika, and crushed red pepper. The combination was not appealing to me, but I was, of course, willing to try it. Michele said that the dish was “southern Moroccan…I learned this from my mother who ate it while she traveled around. She’s obsessed with this.”


Turning back to the tagine, Michele tasted the stew, and then turned off the heat; finally, the sauce had darkened and sweetened to her liking. It was time to eat.

Michele served up the tagine in a bowl over a bed of millet with a side of bread and dished out the salad on plates. I sat down and took a bite of the piping hot goodness.

Whoa.

The perfumed soul* of the spices, tender lamb, the deep sweet of the prunes that burst with flavor when you bit into them, the crunch of the almonds, the earthy, roasted flavor of millet - holy crap was this stuff good. In fact, this is the best food that this blog has seen thus far.

The salad looked beautiful, but, I have to admit, the olives were a little much for me. It was not bad – just a taste combination that did not agree with my American palate. I imagined that the same salad would be delicious if made with toasted pine nuts and pomegranate seeds instead of the olives. When I shared this idea with Michele, she very flatly and very unenthusiastically stated, “You could try that.”


Between bites of food, Michele proclaimed, “Oh my God, I actually did this well after not having made this for years! And now you know why I can’t go to Moroccan restaurants, it’s just never this good…I think they dumb down the spices.” She was proud of her accomplishment.

We stuffed our faces until we could barely move and until we both had to unbutton our pants and lie on the couch in a food-induced coma. In the midst of moans like "I'm so full, I feel sick" and "I don't even think I can eat dessert," Michele suggested that we meet again so that she could teach me how to make a chicken, quince, and artichoke tagine.

I can’t wait.

(For the recipes, click here.)

*The Moroccan-born writer Edmond Amran el Maleh described Moroccan cuisine as the "perfumed soul" of the culture.

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What Could Be Mo Rockin than Tagine? Part I

I have never cooked Moroccan food. In fact, before this post my experiences with the cuisine were limited to the hit or miss dishes served up at the generic eclectic restaurants that dot the landscape of any urban area, the mediocre vegetarian fare dished out at the ever-popular, well-priced, and cozy Cafe Mogador in the East Village, and an utterly inedible seitan tagine served by the Chicago Diner in my hometown. During my time in living in Spain, I dined on many delicious Moroccan-influenced foods, but I had not had the authentic thing until Michele Amar invited me to cook with her.

Michele - a resident of Greenpoint, Brooklyn - is a highly fit, yoga obsessed, IT specialist with a degree in painting. Admittedly, when I first met Michele, I tagged her as somewhat flighty and overly caffeinated, but, after about five minutes of conversation with her, I realized that only the latter is true. During our conversation, it became very clear that Michele possesses some major brains that contain a deep wealth of knowledge that expands art, music, literature, cultures, and nerdy computer gadgets.

Michele had decided to teach me the Moroccan staple, tagine - a stew of meat, dried fruits, nuts, and pungent spices. When we began our session together, Michele pulled out all of the ingredients and placed them on the counter and then started slicing an onion. She ripped away the skin and the outer layer of the root, then she stopped what she was doing, looked at me, pointed at a second cutting board laid out on the counter and said "Well? Start chopping!"

While we chopped, Michele told me about her family and her Moroccan heritage. Michele's parents had immigrated to the United States in their early twenties when, as Michele said, "Jews could no longer be in Morocco." I asked her if there was some defining moment that caused her family to leave. "I mean Morocco is a fairly peaceful place," she said, "but... everyone was leaving. Back then, it wasn't a place you could live. You know?"

I did know. After Morocco gained independence, and after wars between Arab nations, Palestine, and Israel inflamed animosity toward Jews in Arab lands, being Jewish in the countries of northern Africa and the Middle East was complicated and potentially dangerous. So Michele's family - like hundreds of thousands of other Jews – deserted their homes, businesses, and homeland for France, Israel, and the United States. I asked her if she had visited Morocco. “No, I mean why would I? There’s no one there anymore,” she responded.

Michele was quiet for a minute, then looked at me. "Jeez, my cooking arm is rusty!" I already had finished chopping my onions and she was still working on hers. As I showed her my onion cleaving tricks, Michele told me about how she had come to lose that "cooking arm" of hers. "I used to cook every single meal at home, but when I moved I stopped doing anything the way I used to do it...I slowed down and just never regained that cooking momentum." She then told me about her awful experience living in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant – the unidentifiable smell, the crack hotel across the street, the stolen electricity -"God, it was awful. I just stopped doing the things that I usually did."

I had gone through something similar while living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (cockroaches, mice, rats, a collapsed ceiling, rent checks made out a business called "Brooklyn Entertainment," a phone numberless landlord who could only be reached by email), and had had a similar reaction. Once the rodents had taken over, I was so scared of the health consequences of cooking in my condemnable apartment that I didn't lift a knife for over a month. Our horror stories got me thinking; it seemed to me that we young professionals of New York share common biography. It goes something like this:

"I moved to the city from Michigan/New Jersey/Connecticut and I love New York and everything about it! The food! The art! The public transportation when the trains run on the right tracks! My bedroom doubles as my bathroom, but at least I have a fire escape I can sit on!"

I wonder - is New York forsaking a generation of home cooks by forcing them to live in such cramped quarters with so few amenities? Most of the Gen X- and Y-ers that I know rarely make themselves homemade meals (even the people that I have interviewed thus far eat many of their weekly meals in restaurants). It’s understandable - who wants to cook in an apartment that only has a hot plate, or a mini fridge, or that doesn't have a kitchen sink? Who in their right mind would attempt to cook something as deliciously complicated, messy, and smelly as fish en croûte or carbonara in a studio apartment?

I digress. Back to the story….

"This is a very traditional Moroccan tagine - tagine refers to the traditional clay pot that you'd usually cook this in or it's a kind of stew where's there is some sort of meat and fruit and nut element. The tagine pot is big on the bottom and narrows at the top - something about the shape of it keeps all the moisture in the bottom of it," Michele told me. I asked her if it mattered if we didn't have a tagine pot, and she reassured me that it didn't.

She heated a healthy dose of olive oil in a pot over medium head and as it heated she informed me that Moroccans don't use anything but "olive oil and butter." She instructed me to stir the onions as she removed the lamb from the brown paper in which it was wrapped.


"So, I actually don't have a recipe" Michele and she began cutting the lamb into chunks "We'll have to measure everything as we go, but this dish as typical as you can get. You'd think Whole Foods would have cleaned this meat better!" Michele said as she removed the and thick layers of fat off of the lamb while she cubed it.


She reduced the pan to medium low, added the meat, and stirred it.


"Moroccans go nuts with the spices - we're going to add a shit ton of turmeric," Michele measured out two tablespoons into a small bowl, “that looks like its enough, but we might need more…You can't go wrong really." While Michele added the spices and then the water to the pot, she said “[Tagine is] a really good dish, but in terms of exciting, weird Moroccan stuff its not out there… it’s really standard fare.”


“Standard to Moroccans,” I retorted. Michele laughed, “Yea, we all know how to do this. It’s is like when your at a party and you say ‘Look what I can do!’ and you bring your leg up over your head – tagine is like that.” I laughed, but, in truth, I did not understand the reference. I pictured Michele at a party with fellow yogis attempting to outdo each other with impossible feats of flexibility. In that context, I suppose tagine is indeed like bringing one’s leg up over one’s head.

Time to let the stew simmer…

(Click here for Part II of this series.)

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Up next: Tagine

I will be learning to make a traditional lamb tagine with Michele Amar. Yet another step into meatdom...

End of post.

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A Tale of a Brisket in Two Parts. Part Two: Marinating, Braising, and Feasting

This is part two of of A Tale of a Brisket - for part one, click here.

When Jessie and I returned from our meal - having already worked on the meat for over an hour and having consumed enough wine for Spanish family - we decided to let the beef be and to instead lounge on the couch. While we relaxed, we moved onto a bottle of good bourbon - sweet and thick in its age - and talked about food.

"So, I'm willing to try your brisket, but I don't have high hopes" I admitted to Jessie. "I remember brisket as dry and grey and blech. Oh God! Flashback! Leftover brisket sandwiches - those were the worst! It was like eating chalk. [Insert gagging sound here]. I couldn't pay another kid to take those sandwiches from me." (Sorry, Mom.)

Jessie rolled her eyes. "This from a baby omnivore who doesn't even know what braised meats taste like." I rolled my eyes back and grumbled as I drank my bourbon, but she was right; until that point I had never tried braised meat (not only had I been a vegetarian since I was a teenager, but I also had grown up in the stereotypically American, culinary-drab suburbs of Chicago where hot dogs and pizza puffs were the norm). And until she handed me the aforementioned All About Braising book, I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with the technique.

It had grown late and Jessie and I needed to get up early on Saturday to continue our Pesach preparations. So, I went home and, eight hours later, I was back at Jessie's apartment.

When I arrived with coffee, Jessie had the meat waiting on the counter. "We gotta flip this. We really should have done this last night, but I guess it'll be fine." With two large spatulas, Jessie flipped the large chunks of beef.


Then she covered the pans, put them back in the fridge, and then began chopping onions. "What will you do with those?" I asked. "Caramelize 'em, then toss them in with everything else." Jessie replied. She chopped up 5 onions and then placed them in a pan with a healthy dose of olive oil. "Caramelizing onions is kind of fun - I like the process" Jessie said as she stirred the onions with a large wooden spoon "It just takes kind of a long time, ya know?" When I asked her why she bothered, she told me that caramelizing them add depth to the flavor of the meat that raw onions - like her grandma used - did not.


Once the onions were caramelized (about 25 minutes later), Jessie placed them in a small bowl. Jessie let the meat marinade for four more hours, and then took it out of the refrigerator. "Now comes the braising part" she told me. "So - the reason I'm going to braise Mr. Brisket, is so that the juices are sealed into the meat and so that it doesn't end up like the stuff that your mom fed you when you were a kid."

Jessie placed a large piece of foil on the counter, and removed the meat from the pan, first letting the juices drip back into it. Then she set the meat on the counter and poured the marinade into a bowl, scraping down the sides of her baking dish.


Jessie placed the meat back into the baking pans and then placed them into an oven preheated to 500 degrees. She let the meat brown on one side (about 3-4 minutes), flipped it over, then let it brown on the other side. Then Jessie reduced the oven to 350, added the marinade back to the pan with some beef broth (about one inch worth), and covered it tightly with two layers of tin foil, making sure that the sides were securely sealed.

After it had baked for an hour, Jessie added the caramelized onions and mixed them into the sauce. She flipped the brisket again and then let the meat cook for 2 1/2 more hours, until it was "almost at falling off the bone stage." I could only imagine what that meant.


Then, disaster.

While Jessie was rapturously telling me about pulled meats, I clumsily spilled water on the counter, soaking my camera. Fortunately, I was able to save some of the pictures from the memory card, but my poor little camera wasn't so lucky. Due to this most sad kitchen accident, some of this post will be sadly lacking in photos.

To continue, after I had sounded off a colorful round expletives, and after Jessie had said "Oh, no" about a trillion times, I calmed down and we both got back to work on making the next day's meal.

Two and a half hours later, Jessie removed the brisket from the oven and let it sit, until the pan had cooled somewhat. Then she placed the meat in the refrigerator, saving it for the next day.

The next morning as I was whipping egg whites for a pavlova, I received a text message from Jessie "Erin. Slicing brisket. Returning it to pan once sliced. Will heat up again tomorrow." So our work was done - soon it would be tasting time.

When I arrived at Jessie's on Sunday, the oven was set to 200 degrees and the pans of cooked meat were warming in it. I peered into the oven, and lifted an edge of the tin foil. Steam released and the smell of steak sauce filled my nostrils. I couldn't wait for our guests to arrive and for the Haggadah to be over.

Once our guests arrived and the prerequisite ceremony was over - it was time to try the dish, but not before we had served our entire party their dinner. I could tell by the looks on peoples faces and by the "oohs" and "mmms" that filled the room that I was in for a treat.

We had served the meat over mashed parsnips and the combination looked beautiful; the marinade and meat juices had darkened to a deep purple-y read, and the meat was soft, tender, and had an almost pulled pork quality to it. Finally, I sat down with my plate of food, took a bite, and closed my eyes. My taste buds exploded with the spice from the chipotles, the deep, sweet goodness of the caramelized onions, and the perfect moistness of the meat.

Who knew that a little braising could do so much for a big piece of meat from Kentucky...

Jessie's Grandma's Modified Brisket Recipe
Serves a lot

4lbs brisket
1/2 head of garlic, smashed and peeled
3/4 cup Smith & Wollensky steak sauce
2 tsp soy sauce
6 T Worcestershire sauce
3-5 canned chipotles peppers (to taste), adobo sauce reserved
4-5 large onions
Salt and pepper
1 cup beef broth

One to two days before serving, place meat in large pans and rub brisket with peeled garlic. With a paring knife, make slits into the flesh (about 6-8 small slits per side of beef) and insert a whole garlic clove into each.

On a cutting board pile about 1 - 2 tablespoons of coarse see salt. Using the side of the knife blade, smash 4-5 garlic cloves into the salt until it makes a paste. Repeat. Spread the paste over the beef.

OPTIONAL: add catchup, brown sugar, beer, OR coffee for a different flavor.

In a small bowl mix steak, soy, and Worcestershire sauces, chipotles and a little of the adobo sauce (to taste). Pour the mixture over the meat and let marinade for at least 12 hours and up to 24 hours, flipping once. While meat is marinating, caramelize the onions (click here for a recipe). Onions can be made one day ahead of time.

Preheat oven to 500 degrees.

Once meat has marinated, lift meat out of the pan and let the marinade drip off of it and back into the pan. Set on a piece of large tin foil. Pour marinade into a bowl, scraping the pan and removing as much moisture as possible from it. Place meat back into the pan and then cook in the hot oven for 4-5 minutes or until the top is brown. Flip it and bake for 4-5 minutes more, or until browned.

Reduce heat to 350 degrees. Add the marinade back to the pans with beef broth and cover tightly with two layers of tin foil, being careful to fully seal the pans. After one hour, add caramelized onions to the pans, then carefully recover them with the foil. Cook for 2-3 more hours, or until the meat is very tender, but not falling apart.

Once the meat is cooked, remove from oven and let cool. Slice the meat to desired thickness, cover it tightly, and place it in the refrigerator. Let it sit for 6 hours or up to a day. Remove from refrigerator, reheat and serve!

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A Tale of a Brisket in Two Parts. Part One: The Friday Before Pesach

Jessica Candlin loves food. Last year, Jessie (as she is known to her friends) - currently a master's degree candidate in elementary education - moved to a small town in the south of Spain to teach English to a mostly immigrant population. While she was there, she discovered the convenience and luxury of the European marketplace - fish pulled from the nearby ocean, just-butchered meats, and freshly picked fruits and vegetables were easily garnered at the local outdoor markets. Jessie took pleasure in challenging herself how to use the local foods that she could procure and, in doing so, became a great and inspired home cook.

Jessie is a good friend of mine and both of us take pleasure not only in partaking in the epicurean delights of food, but also in sharing them with others. So, a few months ago, she and I schemed to throw a giant Passover celebration and - given our shared joy of feeding people - by the time we were done planning our Seder, 28 people had accepted our invitation to eat and to celebrate with us.

Twenty-eight people.

In a New York apartment.

OK - so Jessie lives in a large New York apartment, but it's a New York apartment nonetheless. That meant we had to be super creative with the seating arrangements and make a hell of a lot of food. Jessie and I decided that we would serve a Moroccan-inspired fish and something more traditional: brisket.

I want to take a minute here to share with you that for the past twelve years I have been a vegetarian (well, if you want to get technical, a lacto-ovo-pesco-tarian), and my first foray back into eating hoofed animals was with the second post on this blog. By Passover, I still had not had much experience eating meat or things with meat products in them. Just Tara's chowder, a little bite of hamburger, one piece of bacon, and three buffalo chicken wings (damn those are good!). Brisket was going to be a big step back into carnivorism for me. One big, delicious step.

Jessie insists that the secret to perfect braised meat (like the one she was going to teaching me to make) was cooking it the day before it is to be served. Making it ahead of time, she told me, ensures a more flavorful dish. In this case, cooking the meat one day before Passover meant marinating it two days before our Sunday event. When I arrived to her house on Friday evening, the local butcher had just dropped off our eight pounds of raw beef.


As Jessie pulled the meat from the refrigerator, she told me that we were going to use her grandma's recipe, but not exactly. She planned on diverging from it somewhat by using a Smith & Wollensky product instead of Heinz 57 Sauce, by braising the flesh before cooking it, and by caramelizing the onions.

While she was looking for pans large enough to hold the brisket, Jessie reassured me that once I had experienced braised meats, I would never look vegetarianism in the eye again. "Now that I've become an expert braiser, I love braising everything. I feel like most home cooks don't braise food very often, and that's a shame because braising makes everything taste delicious" Jessie said.

"How did you become an 'expert braiser?'" I inquired.

"Oh you know, I read a great book and then experimented a lot" Jessie replied. Later in the evening - once the meat was dressed and once we had relaxed with a bottle of wine - Jessie produced this book for me. Titled All About Braising: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking, the publication is considered the definitive work on the technique and it has been honored with both an IACP and a James Beard Award in a single subject category. As I flipped through the books glossy pages and looked at the photos contained within it, I knew that my friend was right - that I was on the verge of a taste revolution.

Jessie took out a head of garlic and began smashing clove upon clove in order to remove their papery skins, as she did this, she reiterated her love of braising and of braised foods. "It's just so good! Braised meats just melt in your mouth!" Then, she rubbed the meat with one of the undressed cloves.

Jessie looked at the beef, then at the remaining smashed cloves, and said, "You know what - I'm going to make a paste." She threw a pile of coarse salt on the cutting board and, with the side of a pairing knife, began to smash the garlic into the salt until it turned into - well - until it turned into goop. "This is something one of my ex-boyfriends taught me how to do. The paste also makes a great base for a dressing - it makes it super delicious and spicy. It also makes your breath small really bad for a really long time, so you have to make it and eat it with someone else. You know? So that you're not alone."


Jessie took the paste and spread it on top of the brisket. Then, with her pairing knife, Jessie made slices in the flesh, and inserted some of the remaining whole smashed cloves into them. As she finished rubbing in the garlic mixture into the meat, she said "So I think I need too make a buttload of this" and then continued making more paste. Once the "buttload" of paste was made, she added it to the meat.


"I cooked so much in Spain..." Jessie said as she read the recipe "...that I got to a point where I cooked everything freestyle, but now that I'm in school I don't cook as much anymore, and I think I've lost a little bit of that talent" She scratched her the area behind her ear, and then looked at me with wide eyes.

"Oh sh*t! I think I just got some eau de garlic on my neck!" Indeed, after pulverizing an entire head of garlic with her bare hands, the area that she had touched smelled strongly of the spice. "That's never going to go away!"

"Do you know how to get that out?" I asked. She immediately responded with "Rub it with stainless steal?" We knowingly looked at each other, then began raiding the kitchen drawers. She had to have something that wouldn't cut her or irritate her skin. Finally, I found it - a knife sharpener - she snatched it from me and began massaging her neck with it.


"Thank God! Is it gone?" Jessie asked leaning her face in towards me. The trick had worked. We both sighed with relief.

Then, she sliced more garlic and poured the Smith & Wollensky sauce into a bowl. "Ok, so now we make the marinade. See how exact I am?" She said sarcastically as she added soy sauce to the mixture without measuring it. "What else can I add?" Jessie found a can of open chipotles and brought them to the counter. As she began chopping up some peppers, she said "There's no way chipotles could make the meat worse."


Once finely chopped, Jessie added the peppers to the marinade. "See, now it's my recipe, not just my grandma's" she said and dumped liquid over the meat. "Now you give it a little massage and thank Mr. Brisket for coming all the way from Kentucky for us."


Why Kentucky you ask? Earlier in the evening I recounted to Jessie that during our senior year at the University of Wisconsin, I had read that the warehouse of the largest American brisket supplier - located in that southern state - had burned to the ground and that Jewish mothers across the nation were up in arms because of it. Jessie also happened to remember that article and reminded me that we went to school in the birthplace of The Onion. Heh heh. Whoops. (Admittedly I am known amongst my friends for remembering obscure facts and figures, but often inaccurately.)

Jessie picked up the pans of meat and put them in the refrigerator. "We'll flip 'em later. Let's get some food! I'm starving." So, we left the meat to marinade and headed to a local restaurant for some grub.

To be continued...

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Up next - Brisket

Look for the next NYCookery post this upcoming Monday! I will be cooking with a South Slope resident who will teach me how to make her grandmother's famous brisket. Perfect for the Passover holiday.

End of post.

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Simple Salad, Park Slope BK

Yes, yes, we all know how to make salad, but how often do you find yourself in a restaurant thinking, "Wow, this salad is really good! This dressing is delectable! Why does mine never taste like this?" Well it happens to me a lot, but never when I'm eating at Sarah Nassauer's house.

Sarah is a reporter for a large national newspaper. Before she entered into the world of journalism, she lived in Paris for five years and - with that culinary playground as her backdrop - progressively became a great home cook and a foodie. Sarah also had the advantage of having a mother who is a landscape architect and who always had a large garden filled with lettuces and fresh herbs - something that cultivated her palate and her liking of fresh and simple food.

Last night, Sarah and I decided to make dinner for some friends, and I asked her to show me how to make her salad dressing and the salad that went with it. As one would expect, she began by washing the lettuce, but she did so with a grimace.


I think most home cooks can identify one step of the cooking process as something they don't like to do. Mine is grating things. I hate it. Cheese, rinds, butter, potatoes, chocolate. Doesn't matter. I freaking despise it. Though I can't tell you what it is about grating that I abhor so much, I can tell you that this abhorrence leads to haste. In my numerous efforts to speed up the grating process, I have ended up with bloodied fingertips a countless number of times. And that is just another reason to hate that wretched cooking task! Grating one's skin is probably most painful and cringe-worthy kitchen injury out there, but I digress....

Sarah felt about drying lettuce like I do about grating. "I hate drying lettuce!" she said emphatically as the faucet was running "It's my least favorite part of cooking things." I asked her what she did once the lettuce was cleaned. "Oh, I just set it somewhere and let it dry a bit. I never do what my mom does and actually put it in a Tupperware with paper towels. That's too much work."As she finished washing she again said with disdain, "God, it drives me nuts."


Once Sarah had washed (but not dried) the lettuce. She cut off the bottoms of the two stalks and opened up the leaves, spreading them out over the counter on top of a cutting board. Then she began making the dressing.

"When I know I'm making a salad that will be eaten soon, I just make the dressing in the bottom of the salad bowl. I like the convenience of saving space on the table and then there's less to clean up later." She took out a large bottle of olive oil and poured some into the bottom of the bowl. "How much olive oil do you use?" I asked. She placed her thumb and forefinger on the clear bowl, and measured its depth. Then, holding her digits out to me she said in all seriousness, "About this much."

She took two lemons and squeezed the juice into her hand, catching the seeds, but letting the juice drip into the bowl through her fingers.


Sarah then chopped up almost an entire head of cilantro, and added it to the bowl with a generous pinch of salt and 4-5 cranks of a pepper mill.


"Then you taste it," Sarah stated as she dipped a spoon into the dressing and brought it to her lips. She added a little more salt, then ripped up the lettuce and placed it in the bowl with the dressing. "And now you toss it to coat, et voila!" The salad was finished.

I know the dressing is simple, but in its simplicity - the tartness of the lemon combined with the pungent flavor of the cilantro - lies the secret to a great salad.


SARAH NASSAUER'S SALAD DRESSING
4-5 T high-quality olive oil
The juice of 2 lemons
1/2 cup chopped cilantro
1 tsp salt
4-5 grinds of a pepper mill

Mix ingredients together and add to your favorite salad!

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