Salad Party | Kristy Mucci
Salad Party
By Kristy Mucci
Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery By The Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Kristy Mucci: I'm Kristy Mucci, and my first cookbook is Salad Party, and it's out now from Chronicle Books.
Suzy Chase: You're a writer, produce enthusiast, recipe tester and developer food and prop stylist, former editor at Food 52 and Saveur magazine, and now cookbook author. With Salad Party, these days of the boring salad are officially over. Beyond the standard bowl of lettuce and dressing you put together unique combinations. Can you describe how this cookbook works?
Kristy Mucci: Yeah, it's actually my editor who had the idea for the design, but each page is broken into three panels. So the top is the dressings and the middle is what we're calling toppings, and then the bottom is bases. And they're little flaps so you can switch back and forth and mix and match and make over 3000 combinations.
Suzy Chase: I read somewhere that someone called it a flip book for adults.
Kristy Mucci: I love that.
Suzy Chase: I love that too.
Kristy Mucci: It kind of makes making salads a bit of a game, which some friends of mine who have kids have said it's been great for them. The kids are a little bit more involved in helping decide what they're going to eat and cook. I'm thrilled about that. If I could get more kids excited about cooking and produce, then that's a win for everyone.
Suzy Chase: During the quarantine, I really made an effort to think of salads as more of a main dish than a garnish. Do you have a favorite go to weeknight salad combination out of the book?
Kristy Mucci: Out of the book? I want to say right now, I'm really into the cilantro lime dressing, so I'm kind of putting that with everything. But I really like a cold salad with cilantro lime dressing, the shredded chicken and white rice. And then I can throw in herbs or shaved radishes or some grated carrot as a base. The rice and the chicken and the cilantro lime dressing is my current favorite.
Suzy Chase: And I noticed that not all of the bases are lettuce. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Kristy Mucci: Yeah. So most people think salad is like leaves on a plate with maybe some vegetables thrown in, and that's not necessarily true. A salad can be an entire meal and it can be a grain-based salad or a pasta salad or something that's a little bit heartier than I think what most people think of when they think of salad. They're like, Oh yeah, just like mixed leaves and maybe some tomato.
Suzy Chase: Speaking of tomato, in the summer, there's really nothing better than a good cherry tomato in your salad, out of the salad or really wherever. You have an awesome hack for slicing all the tomatoes at once. Can you tell us about that one?
Kristy Mucci: Yeah. I actually learned this from Amanda Hesser at Food 52 way back in the day when I worked there. You take two tops from deli containers and you fill one with cherry tomatoes and then you place the other top on top of that, and you just take your knife and slice right through. And then you have a bunch of halved tomatoes.
Suzy Chase: You wrote an article when you were working at Food 52 about vinaigrette. This was way back in 2016. You wrote, "I used to love putting time into making a salad, carefully washing and drying the leaves, making a proper vinaigrette. using my hands to make sure the leaves were all evenly dressed. That's a lovely time. And I'd been depriving myself of all that enjoyment. Thanks to Nora Ephron, I felt inspired to get back to my old ways." Can you talk a little bit about that?
Kristy Mucci: That is part of a series I did for Food 52 after I went through kind of a really messy time. I was going through your divorce and gosh backstory one day, my husband left and didn't come home for five months and refused to talk to me. So I kind of stopped cooking. I just totally stopped all of life. And then I moved into a new place. And then this messy divorce started, and so I took really a full year off of cooking, because I was just sad and trying to figure out a new life. And when I wanted to get back to cooking, it felt really awkward. I dropped a knife one. I've never done that in my life. I'm a professional food person. So I was just kind of getting my sea legs back in the kitchen and Kristen at Food 52 let me write a series about getting back to cooking, which is really getting back to my life.
And I read Nora Ephron's Heartburn. I've read it a couple times, but there was one weekend I read it in the middle of writing this series and this light bulb went off because in the book, the character is food writer and she mentions her vinaigrette. recipe a lot throughout the book. It's so good. Her ex-husband is never going to find anybody who makes a vinaigrette. just like this, and she's not going to share the recipe. And I don't know if this is a spoiler, the book's pretty old, so hopefully everybody's read it. In the end, she shares the recipe.
But this light bulb went off and it was really thanks to Nora Ephron. I was like, "What am I doing? I'm just throwing stuff in a bowl and drizzling some olive oil and maybe squeezing some lemon and not even caring if I got lemon seeds in there. And it was this nice reminder that there's this part of my life, and there's this wonderful thing that I love doing and I can give that to myself. So I started keeping a jar of her vinaigrette. in my fridge, and that was kind of really one of the first major steps to getting back to being a professional food person.
Suzy Chase: You have a classic vinaigrette. and salad party. Was this one influenced by Nora?
Kristy Mucci: Yes, yes. It was the first thing I thought of to include in the book. Everybody needs a classic vinaigrette. and I cannot think of one without thinking of her.
Suzy Chase: One interesting recipe I saw in the cookbook was spicy fish sauce. Can you describe this? And what goes good with it?
Kristy Mucci: So we have a combination of super savory fish sauce and lime, and I use the juice and the zest of the lime because I want all of the acidity and tang that a lime can provide. We have a little bit of grated garlic and some red pepper. And I only call for a quarter teaspoon of the red pepper flakes, but you can go as heavy as you like, as mild as you like, but I start there. And I really like it with the black rice and garlicky shrimp. And then I'll throw in a bunch of herbs to go with that, particularly cilantro and a little bit of mint. I also think it's really good with the broccoli, with lemon and almonds. And I like that to go on top of either the soba noodles or the sliced kale, and maybe I'll add an egg to that, to just make it a little bit more substantial. I really like it with the tender lettuces and the shredded salt and pepper chicken. And I'll definitely add some shaved radishes and more herbs, I kind of like to throw herbs everywhere.
Suzy Chase: This just goes to show us that this book is so creative. You can do so much with it.
Kristy Mucci: Yeah. And you don't even have to stick to the three components. If there are two toppings you really like, or however many toppings you think would be good, it doesn't have to just be a three component salad.
Suzy Chase: Talk about a little bit about how you prep for the week.
Kristy Mucci: Every week, usually it's a Sunday, I'll put on a grain. Right now I'm just really craving white rice, so that's the one I'm making. So I always make a grain, and then if I have some hardy greens, I slice those up or I prep them to be the shape that I want them to be for kind of just like grabbing and adding to a salad. I always set a pot, a very salty water on to boil. And then I just put a few different vegetables through there so I have things that are crisp tender and ready to go to add as garnishes to any meal. This week I did romanesco cauliflower and some carrots and asparagus and some new potatoes, all with the same pot of water. I always have two jars of dressing in the fridge. So basically, by the end of my few hours, my kitchen or my fridge is full of containers of things that are ready to go and putting a meal together is kind of just like assembling a puzzle. I don't know, it feels very minimal effort, but then the payoff is huge because I have everything I need just kind of at the ready.
Suzy Chase: Now I'd like to chat about your personal website, Kristymucci.com. And on that you have the most wonderful resource page for getting good ingredients from small farms and businesses while social distancing. Plus, over on your Instagram page, you share a Google spreadsheet of black owned farms.
Kristy Mucci: Yeah. I am a big supporter of farmers and I have very personal relationships with them and I do some consulting. And my whole passion, I would say is about supporting small farmers. So when the restaurants closed, I was really concerned about how all the farmers I knew were going to make up for those losses. So I reached out to them and started putting together a list of farms that were pivoting to CSA models or that we're offering some kind of contactless pickup. So I made that list.
And then people were asking, "Where do you get your ingredients from, how are you going to do this while you're social distancing?" And luckily, a lot of the places I love to buy from have very easy online ordering. So I just put that together to help people out. And then in the past few weeks with all of the protests and all of this learning that we're doing, I thought it would be good to especially help black farmers.
The history of prejudice against black farmers in the country is atrocious. And a lot of people don't know about it. And somebody put together this amazing spreadsheet with links to that information, and then just with links to all of these farmers that you can very easily support. And they're doing the same things, offering CSA or contactless pickup. It feels really important right now to be supporting small farmers and supporting black farmers as much as we can.
Suzy Chase: So the other night I made tender lettuces, mushrooms with shallots and thyme, with maple and mustard vinaigrette. That was such a delicious, interesting combination.
Kristy Mucci: That sounds really good. I like that a lot. And I think in the colder months, that would be really nice with kale as the base.
Suzy Chase: And what is also good about this cookbook is, I'm not going to the grocery store every day now. So I kind of chose this thinking about what things I had in my pantry and it turned out so good.
Kristy Mucci: I'm so happy to hear that I want to help people make delicious meals as easily as possible. So if this is what you have on hand, you can definitely make a combination from this book.
Suzy Chase: So other than this combination that I made, there are 3,374 more in this amazing cookbook. What went into testing all these combinations?
Kristy Mucci: Oh boy. Having a few friends over and I would do three at a time and make all of the various combinations from that and then save leftovers and then make three more and then taste all of those. It was just a lot of eating. And when I was developing the cookbook or initially coming up with ideas, I was obviously thinking with that idea in mind, everything has to go well together. So I thought that I would try to keep the toppings. Obviously they are good on their own, but they can be a little bit more mild in flavor. And I would use the dressings as like the real kick.
Suzy Chase: So when you were planning for this cookbook, did the layout come first and then the recipes come second? How did that work?
Kristy Mucci: Yeah. My editor Dan, she reached out and said, "We have this really fun design idea, but we need an author and a concept and recipes. Do you want to do it?" "Did you really just ask me if I want to make a cookbook? Of course I do."
And we decided on salads. We had talked about maybe pizza or pasta, but I felt like salads were really the most versatile and I'm so crazy about produce that it just made the most sense.
Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called my favorite cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?
Kristy Mucci: I think it has to be An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler because that book has gotten me through many cooking ruts in my life. Every once in a while you just kind of turn off and stop cooking, and I pick that book up and I'm back to it. It's like a little reminder of everything I love and believe about cooking. I would say that one. And I think it's a book that would make any novice feel comfortable in the kitchen and a successful home cook.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Kristy Mucci: I'm on Instagram @Kristy Mucci. That's kind of the main thing I use. And then my website, people can get in touch with me through there.
Suzy Chase: And your website is KristyMucci.com.
Kristy Mucci: Yes.
Suzy Chase: Well, thanks Kristy for coming on Cookery By The Book podcast.
Kristy Mucci: Thank you so much for having me.
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