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Lisa
Messinger's
Cookbook Corner
Ladle,
Leaf, & Loaf: Soup, Salad, and Bread for Every Season
by
Lisa Cowden (Houghton Mifflin)
  A
bowl of chunky vegetable soup, a hunk of French bread and a crisp
green salad with oil and vinegar: good. A bowl of roasted red pepper
soup with crisp julienned potatoes, a cornmeal popover with lemon-honey
butter and a garden salad with tarragon vinaigrette and herb and
cheese croutons: better.
Lisa
Cowden has pulled out her salad spinner, soup pots and loaf pans
to put a new spin on the well-loved soup and salad meal. In
her book, she's got 11 other spiffy menus just like that (and hundreds
more when you figure out your own combinations) which just may tempt
you to give heavier meals the heave-ho for good.
Cowden
also illustrated her book. Her illustrations have been published
in the New York Times and she's been a dinnerware designer
for Corning. Judging from her book, she's also pretty handy with
the kind of Corningware that goes in the oven and on the stovetop.
If the busy career woman filled her nights with meals of soup, salad
and bread, we're now the beneficiaries. Choices like spinach and
onion soup with rosemary-walnut dumplings, red and yellow tomato
soup with broiled tomatoes and carrot soup with Vidalia onion and
sesame are filling, nutritious and packed with flavor.
Cowden
gives you simple recipes for making your own chicken, beef or fish
stock and vegetable consommé or permits using canned. There's so
much flavor in the additional ingredients in most of the soups that
the difference between using homemade stock and canned is negligible.
Salads
are varied and delicious. Some standouts: from the grains, dried
beans and pasta section, wild rice salad with walnut oil and lemon
dressing gets further enhancement from chopped pistachios and baby
peas; from the seafood section, mussel salad with poppy seed dressing
gets its delicious start with lemon rind, lemon juice and the mussels
cooking in two cups of dry vermouth; from the root vegetable section,
root vegetable slaw with creamy caraway dressing is punched up with
julienned carrots, parsnip and rutabaga rather than slaw's traditional
cabbage.
For
many diners, meals made from Cowden's soups and salads would be
filling enough. If you feel up to making your own bread accompaniment,
though (which certainly could be done ahead of time, as could most
of the soups and some of the salads), she gives some good selections.
(And often doesn't stop there, since many are presented with their
own butters and spreads as companions.) Cardamom raisin bread, for
instance, gets slathered with hazelnut butter, which Cowden flavors
with cinnamon and honey. Her blue cornbread, spicy soda bread and
buttermilk biscuits mingle with cilantro-jalapeno butter. Her pesto
cheese spread is just the ticket for her forty-clove garlic bread
or onion or sesame flatbreads. Whoever said a meal of soup, salad
and bread isn't satisfying certainly never met Lisa Cowden.
RECIPES
—Spinach
and Onion Soup with Rosemary-Walnut Dumplings
—Portobello Mushroom
Salad with Red Wine Vinegar Dressing
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