Mike Van de Elzen: Christmas salad recipes

Christmas in summer means more room for cooler dishes over roasts - and these recipes are a step up from the usual potato salad and coleslaw. 

Roasted carrots with mint emulsion and spiced chickpeas 

Cook time: 45 minutes 

Prep time: 20 minutes 

Serves: 12

20 carrots cut in half  

2 tbsp sunflower oil  

flaky smoked seasalt  

Miso emulsion  

2 soft boiled eggs  

1 tbsp miso paste  

4 tbsp orange juice  

juice of 1 lemon  

1 cup coriander leaves and stalks  

10 mint leaves  

1 tbsp brown sugar  

1 clove garlic  

1 tbsp ginger, peeled  

300 ml grapeseed oil  

Spiced chickpeas  

1/4 cup sunflower seeds, roasted  

1/4 cup pumpkin seeds, roasted  

1 can drained chickpeas  

1 tsp paprika  

1 tsp ground cummin  

1 tsp ground coriander  

1/2 tsp crushed farm chili

Pre heat the oven to 180*c. 

Cut the carrots in half and drizzle with oil and sprinkle with some smoked salt. Place into the oven and roast until tender.  

Combine all the ingredients for the spiced chickpeas in a bowl and toss, lay out onto a roasting tray and place in the oven along with the carrots. Cooked for 45 minutes stirring every 10 until crispy. Allow to cool .

Make up the mint emo.

Bring a pot of water to the boil and carefully drop in your eggs. Time them for 5 minutes before removing and placing into iced water till cold. Carefully roll the eggs breaking the shell before peeling. (good luck!)  

Place all the ingredients apart from the oil into the blender and turning on slowly before turning up and slowly drizzle in the oil. Season with salt and pepper if required.  

Spoon a couple tablespoons of mint emo onto a platter and stack the roasted carrots on top and finish with the spiced chickpeas.

Pickled vegetables 

Cook time: 5 minutes 

Prep time: 10 minutes 

Serves: 12 

Pickled vegetables can include:  

Carrots, fennel, baby beetroot, radish, red onions, cucumbers or red cabbage  

1 tsp fennel seeds  

1 tsp coriander seeds  

2 chilli  

2 bay leaves  

1 tsp mustard seeds  

300 ml water  

200 ml cider vinegar  

1/2 cup sugar  

Sterilized jar and lid 

Firstly prepare your vegetables. Clean all the vegetables and cut in 1/2, 1/4 or finely slice. Trying to make all the vegetable pieces roughly the same size.  

To make your pickle mixture, start by toasting your seeds in a pan until fragrant. Place the rest of the pickling mixture ingredients into a pot, adding seeds once toasted and heat until boiling.  

Remove the pickling mixture from the heat and carefully pour the hot mixture over the top of the vegetables and seal with a lid. (If pickling cucumbers or finely sliced veg allow mixture to cool first).

To sterilize your jars and lids, start by washing the jars and lids in soapy water and rinse well with hot water. Place the jars onto a tray, top side up and then into a cold oven and turn onto 100*c. Once the oven reaches 100*c leave in the oven for another 10 minutes or until all the water has evaporated. Remove jars from the oven to allow to cool slightly before use.  

For the lids, simply place them into a pot and cover with cold water. Bring the water to the boil and heat the lids for 10 minutes before draining and using.

Charred radicchio with rosemary and hazelnut dressing 

Cook time: 5 minutes 

Prep time: 3 minutes 

Serves: 12 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudgin
from News Talks EDB.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Joining me now is our residence chief Mike vander Allison.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Good morning, Good morning.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
I was just having a bit of a laugh at
with Michelder concern about Christmas trees.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
Have you got your Christmas tree up in the school
for all the events? Yes, but not in the house.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Well halfway there, it's pretty good. Yeah, No, I got
my tree up your sid. I can't resist a live tree,
I really can't. Hopefully it's still standing when I get home.
How difficult he is getting in the stand this year,
But we will wait.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
It is tricky while we do at the schools. I've
got a I had a big stand made up and
then I set the Christmas tree into like a ten
lead bucket, and I fill the ten lead a bucket
with what we call sap seven or it's like quite
a coarse sand, and I packed that sand in and
so the sand holds the tree in place in the bottom.
Plus also you can water it because the water can
filter down through the sand and feed Trea.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
Well, this is slightly more sophisticated set up than what
we have.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Seems to work.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
We are on, of course, our Christmas sort of menu.
You're providing us with lots of ideas. We're going to
talk about salads today because well and some of that's
what we.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
Want to eat, right, And that's where we are completely
different than northern Northern hemis there. Obviously they're going to
be in the depths of winter, so they're looking for
a heavier, hotter items. We're down here, we're probably looking
for the complete opposite. So that's where salads come, them,
come into them, come into their own. And I thought

(01:44):
i'd just kind of run through again, run through some
tips like I did last week around the platters, so
try and we're just going to try and take it
up a notch from the standard potato and colstal. Not
that there's anything wrong with them, but I just thought
i'd just kind of open our eyes up to salad.
So when it comes to salads, dressings are probably the
key to a salad. They provide the flavor, they provide

(02:08):
the moisture most of the time, and they also sometimes
provide the texture, like if there's a nut running through
that dressing, but don't feel you need to dress the
whole salad sometimes when we serve up a salad, we
might just dress the roasted carrots and then the rest
of it is undressed. So you're kind of getting that
heavily dressed one part. The other side is light and

(02:29):
light and crispy. Make up your dressings the day before,
and also prep your vegetables the day before, and that
kind of runs into the next thing that we do
in kitchens is we have what we call one lead
of containers that are like a lily container, and they
are our go to in all commercial kitchens to store food.
So you could go to like a two dollars shop
or somewhere that get some cheap takeaway containers, and then

(02:52):
as you're prepping your vegetables, you're just stacking them into
those containers, you're labeling them up, and then you're stacking
those containers the same in the same piles and the fridge.
And so when it comes to the data actually making
those salads, you just get a big bowl and you
go right that stack there is my roasted carrot salad.
I pull that stack out, you open up all containers
into the bowl. It goes, get stressed, gets served, and

(03:14):
then those containers are really handy for leftovers afterwards as well.
Next thing is try and get away from the starches
or open our minds up to other starches and not
just potatoes, so things like roasted carrots, beetroots, pumpkin. Pumpkin's
going a little bit up in price at the moment,
but kumuter are still really really affordable, so you can
roast them off and have them as an alternative to potatoes.

(03:38):
Acids are really important in a salad, so think of
things like tomatoes or even making up a pickled vegetable
mix that you run through the salad, because what that
does is when you eat that pickled item, it cuts
through that excess fat potentially that you're eating from a
like the fat on a ham or the fat on

(03:58):
a lamb. And then finally, don't feel that you need
to overload your platter. So if you've got this big platter,
don't feel that you need to stack up a massive
mount Fuji size part of vegetables on top of it.
Kind of just platter half of it and leave half
of it clean. And then what you can do is
you can always have back up in the fridge, so

(04:19):
then you can come out and just clean the platter
down and redo it. So that's kind of my little
kind of go to tips for salads to just brighten
up that Christmas banquet.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Really good tips. I really like the one of preparing
things the day before because you know, it just helps
keep everything and it means that I mean, you know,
it's fantastic when you have Christmas and everybody contributes, but
a lot of the time one person is probably carrying
the load. And the great thing about that is that
the great thing about that is that you kind of

(04:50):
this's the person who is carrying the load might get
to also have a little bit of downtime and enjoy
things and not be constantly chopping vegetables in the kitchen. Now,
Mike has given us three fantastic recipes Roasted carrots with
mint emulsion and spiced chickpeas, pickled vegetables, chad redditchio with
rosemary and hazelnut dressing. We're going to put those all

(05:13):
up on our website newstalkzb dot co dot m Z
forward slash Sunday for these fabulous recipes and we'll be
covering off the protein the meat next week on the show.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin. Listen
live to News Talk ZB from nine am Sunday, or
follow the podcast on iHeartRadio