{"id":16105,"date":"2018-04-01T01:10:10","date_gmt":"2018-04-01T06:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paganpages.org\/content\/?p=17534"},"modified":"2018-03-24T11:34:19","modified_gmt":"2018-03-24T16:34:19","slug":"the-kitchen-witch-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/2018\/04\/01\/the-kitchen-witch-32\/","title":{"rendered":"The Kitchen Witch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Green Goddess Salad <\/b><\/u><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

April is the month that spring really gets into high gear, even here in Buffalo. April is the month of Venus, the goddess of love and with flowers beginning to bloom, it\u2019s easy to see why. April is also the month of Earth day \u2013 April 22. I was ten years old the very first Earth Day. When I was a freshman in college, in my women\u2019s studies classes, I read Silent Spring<\/u><\/i> by Rachel Carson. If you haven\u2019t read this book, you really should!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I have always celebrated Earth Day with a vegetarian meal, usually a Big Salad. Green Goddess Salad is a perfect Earth Day choice. It mixes the celebration of Venus with the celebration of the green earth. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This is one of my absolute favorite salads. I have made it dozens of times, although I haven\u2019t made it in quite a long time. It\u2019s a little on the expensive side but I think it\u2019s worth it. My recipe is from a cookbook that I wish <\/i>I knew the name of but unfortunately <\/i>it was in that period of time where I copied recipes out of books I got from the library and never wrote down the name of the cookbook! Which makes it really <\/i>difficult to reference now<\/i>! Suffice it to say that I have been making this salad for thirty years and I have tweaked the recipe numerous times \u2013 enough that it\u2019s MY recipe now. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I did a little research on the history of the Green Goddess Salad. It was created at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in 1923 to honor the actor George Arliss, who was starring in the play, \u201cThe Green Goddess<\/i>\u201d, written by William Archer, which had been a big hit on Broadway and was now touring the United States. Arliss would star in two movies of that name, one made in 1923 and another one in 1930, for which he would receive an Oscar nomination. George Arliss was a big star of the stage and silent movies in the early twentieth-century but he is almost forgotten today. Likewise, both the play and the movie \u201cThe Green Goddess<\/i>\u201d have been lost in the mists of time. I read the synopsis of the screenplay and I can\u2019t imagine \u201cThe Green Goddess<\/i>\u201d being popular in today\u2019s culture \u2013 it\u2019s a very silly romantic comedy about a plane wreck in a south-sea island and the need of a human sacrifice to a \u201cGreen Goddess<\/i>\u201d \u2013 all kinds of ridiculous antics before the British air corps save the day. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike the play or the movie, Green Goddess Salad stayed popular throughout the 1940\u2019s and 1950\u2019s and into the 1960\u2019s. There was a bottled version of the dressing but that disappeared in the 1970\u2019s when ranch dressing became popular. Apparently, you can still buy it online but it\u2019s $7.50 a bottle! I think it might be a tad cheaper to make it fresh! Not to mention much tastier! <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

If you Google \u201cGreen Goddess Salad\u201d, you will find all kinds of salads. Some have chicken in them, some have shrimp, some have garbanzo beans. Some have \u201cupdated\u201d versions of the salad dressing, omitting the mayonnaise and the sour cream and substituting avocado, making it a truly green dressing. Some have gotten rid of the creamy aspect of the dressing altogether \u2013 the Park Restaurant in San Francisco now serves a \u201cGreen Goddess Salad\u201d with a dressing that is basically a vinaigrette made with tarragon wine vinegar and olive oil! Yes, the herbs are the same and there are anchovies in the mixture. But how can you have a \u201cGreen Goddess Salad\u201d without a creamy salad dressing? Maybe I\u2019m an old fart but that just doesn\u2019t seem right to me!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The recipe I copied from the \u201cmystery cookbook\u201d was quite simple \u2013 but that was the way salads were thirty or forty years ago. Here is a scan of the recipe from MY cookbook, complete with typos:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Because I am not going to be serving six people, I too \u201cupdated\u201d this salad for my own use. I am having it for my dinner, so naturally it\u2019s going to be on the large size but it\u2019ll be half the size of this recipe.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The first thing I did was make the dressing. I no longer own a blender or food processor, so this was a totally different process. In the old days, I would cut fresh parsley from my garden, coarsely chop the green onions, add everything else and blend. But I couldn\u2019t figure out how to chop the green onions finely enough by hand for a salad dressing, so I decided to put them on the salad instead. I added garlic powder instead. And I had to use dried parsley instead of fresh. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Instead of mayonnaise and sour cream, I used plain Greek yogurt. I used a single-serve container, so it was a little more than half a cup. With that in mind, I used more or less half the amount of the rest of the ingredients. The beauty of making salad dressings is that you can fool around with the seasonings a bit \u2013 it\u2019s not like baking a cake, where you have to be precise. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t use tarragon vinegar. It\u2019s wicked expensive and I have to be honest \u2013 I really do not like the flavor of tarragon very much. So I used white wine vinegar instead. I did add a small amount of dried tarragon with the other herbs. When I tasted it, I decided that it needed a little more anchovy paste and a touch of sugar \u2013 I wasn\u2019t going to add any sugar but I decided that it needed it. I also added a dash of salt. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This salad dressing needs to sit for the ingredients to fully \u201cmarry\u201d and \u201cget happy\u201d, as Emeril would say. Put a cover on the bowl and set it in the refrigerator and do something else for at least fifteen minutes. Thirty minutes are better. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I arranged the greens on a large plate. I rarely eat endive because when I was a kid, I really hated it and now I don\u2019t think about unless a specific recipe calls for it. But I had to admit that the pale curly leaves looked pretty on top of the torn pieces of romaine. I decided to add baby spinach to the mix \u2013 to make the salad greener. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The recipe calls for \u201ctwo medium tomatoes\u201d but I had a bunch of those little \u201cCampari\u201d tomatoes, so I took three of them and halved them and arranged them along the edge of the plate. Then I chopped the green onions that I had omitted from the salad dressing and I added them to the salad. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

At this point, the recipe calls for \u201cfrozen artichoke hearts, cooked, drained & chilled\u201d \u2013 if you want to do this, you can but I only did this the first time I made this recipe. After that, I bought canned artichoke hearts. They\u2019re much easier to deal with and you can refrigerate the ones you don\u2019t use for another salad on another day. As for the olives \u2013 I really wanted to get good Greek olives \u2013 Kalamata Olives would have been perfect \u2013 but the inner-city grocery store I went to didn\u2019t have any. Honestly, I was amazed that they had anchovy paste!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I omitted the anchovies and added salad shrimp instead. This is what the salad looked like when I had it all assembled on the plate and before I put the dressing on it: <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Ok \u2013 this was the problem. When I put the salad dressing on top of the salad, it flowed over the top like slow-moving lava. It wasn\u2019t attractive at all. I quickly threw the salad into a large bowl and mixed it all together until everything was \u201ccoated\u201d with the dressing \u2013 which was what the recipe said to do, after all. Then I rearranged the salad on the plate:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Now \u2013 that looks good enough to eat!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

As I ate, I made a few mental notes. One \u2013 the salad dressing really works better if you have a blender. I think also that fresh parsley and basil are a must. Putting those fresh green herbs into the blender with the mayo\/sour cream\/yogurt and pulverizing the hell out of them gives the dressing the proper pale green color. My dressing \u2013 although it tasted fabulous! \u2013 was white with green flecks. It wasn\u2019t what it was supposed to be. As with Spell-Work, sometimes improvising works and sometimes it doesn\u2019t. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The other thing was substituting salad shrimp for anchovies. If you are serving friends who do NOT like anchovies, then by all means substitute shrimp or chicken or garbanzos or whatever else you wish. But I really missed the flavor and the texture of the anchovies. I can guarantee you that the next time I make this salad \u2013 and it will be quite soon \u2013 I will be putting anchovies on the greens. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

However you make this salad, enjoy Earth Day! Praise to Venus, the Goddess of Love and Spring and all good things! Brightest Blessings!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Click Images for Amazon Information<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/a> ***<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

About the Author:<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Polly MacDavid<\/b>\u00a0lives in Buffalo, New York at the moment but that could easily change, since she is a gypsy at heart. Like a gypsy, she is attracted to the divinatory arts, as well as camp fires and dancing barefoot. She has three cats who all help her with her magic.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Her philosophy about religion and magic is that it must be thoroughly based in science and logic. She is Dianic Wiccan and she is solitary.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

She blogs at\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>silverapplequeen.wordpress.com<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>. She writes about general life, politics and poetry. She is writing a novel about sex, dr<\/span><\/span><\/span>ugs and recovery.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Green Goddess Salad April is the month that spring really gets into high gear, even here in Buffalo. April is the month of Venus, the goddess of love and with flowers beginning to bloom, it\u2019s easy to see why. April is also the month of Earth day \u2013 April 22. I was ten years old the very first Earth Day. When I was a freshman in college, in my women\u2019s studies classes, I read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. If you haven\u2019t read this book, you really should! I have always celebrated Earth Day with a vegetarian meal, usually a Big Salad. Green Goddess Salad is a perfect Earth Day choice. It mixes the celebration of Venus with the celebration of the green earth. This is one of my absolute favorite salads. I have made it dozens of times, although I haven\u2019t made it in quite a long time. It\u2019s a little on the expensive side but I think it\u2019s worth it. My recipe is from a cookbook that I wish I knew the name of but unfortunately it was in that period of time where I copied recipes out of books I got from the library and never wrote down the name of the cookbook! Which makes it really difficult to reference now! Suffice it to say that I have been making this salad for thirty years and I have tweaked the recipe numerous times \u2013 enough that it\u2019s MY recipe now. I did a little research on the history of the Green Goddess Salad. It was created at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in 1923 to honor the actor George Arliss, who was starring in the play, \u201cThe Green Goddess\u201d, written by William Archer, which had been a big hit on Broadway and was now touring the United States. Arliss would star in two movies of that name, one made in 1923 and another one in 1930, for which he would receive an Oscar nomination. George Arliss was a big star of the stage and silent movies in the early twentieth-century but he is almost forgotten today. Likewise, both the play and the movie \u201cThe Green Goddess\u201d have been lost in the mists of time. I read the synopsis of the screenplay and I can\u2019t imagine \u201cThe Green Goddess\u201d being popular in today\u2019s culture \u2013 it\u2019s a very silly romantic comedy about a plane wreck in a south-sea island and the need of a human sacrifice to a \u201cGreen Goddess\u201d \u2013 all kinds of ridiculous antics before the British air corps save the day. Unlike the play or the movie, Green Goddess Salad stayed popular throughout the 1940\u2019s and 1950\u2019s and into the 1960\u2019s. There was a bottled version of the dressing but that disappeared in the 1970\u2019s when ranch dressing became popular. Apparently, you can still buy it online but it\u2019s $7.50 a bottle! I think it might be a tad cheaper to make it fresh! Not to mention much tastier! If you Google \u201cGreen Goddess Salad\u201d, you will find all kinds of salads. Some have chicken in them, some have shrimp, some have garbanzo beans. Some have \u201cupdated\u201d versions of the salad dressing, omitting the mayonnaise and the sour cream and substituting avocado, making it a truly green dressing. Some have gotten rid of the creamy aspect of the dressing altogether \u2013 the Park Restaurant in San Francisco now serves a \u201cGreen Goddess Salad\u201d with a dressing that is basically a vinaigrette made with tarragon wine vinegar and olive oil! Yes, the herbs are the same and there are anchovies in the mixture. But how can you have a \u201cGreen Goddess Salad\u201d without a creamy salad dressing? Maybe I\u2019m an old fart but that just doesn\u2019t seem right to me! The recipe I copied from the \u201cmystery cookbook\u201d was quite simple \u2013 but that was the way salads were thirty or forty years ago. Here is a scan of the recipe from MY cookbook, complete with typos: Because I am not going to be serving six people, I too \u201cupdated\u201d this salad for my own use. I am having it for my dinner, so naturally it\u2019s going to be on the large size but it\u2019ll be half the size of this recipe. The first thing I did was make the dressing. I no longer own a blender or food processor, so this was a totally different process. In the old days, I would cut fresh parsley from my garden, coarsely chop the green onions, add everything else and blend. But I couldn\u2019t figure out how to chop the green onions finely enough by hand for a salad dressing, so I decided to put them on the salad instead. I added garlic powder instead. And I had to use dried parsley instead of fresh. Instead of mayonnaise and sour cream, I used plain Greek yogurt. I used a single-serve container, so it was a little more than half a cup. With that in mind, I used more or less half the amount of the rest of the ingredients. The beauty of making salad dressings is that you can fool around with the seasonings a bit \u2013 it\u2019s not like baking a cake, where you have to be precise. I didn\u2019t use tarragon vinegar. It\u2019s wicked expensive and I have to be honest \u2013 I really do not like the flavor of tarragon very much. So I used white wine vinegar instead. I did add a small amount of dried tarragon with the other herbs. When I tasted it, I decided that it needed a little more anchovy paste and a touch of sugar \u2013 I wasn\u2019t going to add any sugar but I decided that it needed it. I also added a dash of salt. This salad dressing needs to sit for the ingredients to fully \u201cmarry\u201d and \u201cget happy\u201d, as Emeril would say. Put a cover on the bowl and set it in the refrigerator and do something else for at least fifteen minutes. Thirty minutes are better. I arranged the greens on a large plate. I rarely eat endive because when I was a kid, I really hated it and now I don\u2019t think about unless a specific recipe calls for it. But I had to admit that the pale curly leaves looked pretty on top of the torn pieces of romaine. I decided to add baby spinach to the mix \u2013 to make the salad greener. The recipe calls for \u201ctwo medium tomatoes\u201d but I had a bunch of those little \u201cCampari\u201d tomatoes, so I took three of them and halved them and arranged them along the edge of the plate. Then I chopped the green onions that I had omitted from the salad dressing and I added them to the salad. At this point, the recipe calls for \u201cfrozen artichoke hearts, cooked, drained & chilled\u201d \u2013 if you want to do this, you can but I only did this the first time I made this recipe. After that, I bought canned artichoke hearts. They\u2019re much easier to deal with and you can refrigerate the ones you don\u2019t use for another salad on another day. As for the olives \u2013 I really wanted to get good Greek olives \u2013 Kalamata Olives would have been perfect \u2013 but the inner-city grocery store I went to didn\u2019t have any. Honestly, I was amazed that they had anchovy paste! I omitted the anchovies and added salad shrimp instead. This is what the salad looked like when I had it all assembled on the plate and before I put the dressing on it: Ok \u2013 this was the problem. When I put the salad dressing on top of the salad, it flowed over the top like slow-moving lava. It wasn\u2019t attractive at all. I quickly threw the salad into a large bowl and mixed it all together until everything was \u201ccoated\u201d with the dressing \u2013 which was what the recipe said to do, after all. Then I rearranged the salad on the plate: Now \u2013 that looks good enough to eat! As I ate, I made a few mental notes. One \u2013 the salad dressing really works better if you have a blender. I think also that fresh parsley and basil are a must. Putting those fresh green herbs into the blender with the mayo\/sour cream\/yogurt and pulverizing the hell out of them gives the dressing the proper pale green color. My dressing \u2013 although it tasted fabulous! \u2013 was white with green flecks. It wasn\u2019t what it was supposed to be. As with Spell-Work, sometimes improvising works and sometimes it doesn\u2019t. The other thing was substituting salad shrimp for anchovies. If you are serving friends who do NOT like anchovies, then by all means substitute shrimp or chicken or garbanzos or whatever else you wish. But I really missed the flavor and the texture of the anchovies. I can guarantee you that the next time I make this salad \u2013 and it will be quite soon \u2013 I will be putting anchovies on the greens. However you make this salad, enjoy Earth Day! Praise to Venus, the Goddess of Love and Spring and all good things! Brightest Blessings! Click Images for Amazon Information *** About the Author: Polly MacDavid\u00a0lives in Buffalo, New York at the moment but that could easily change, since she is a gypsy at heart. Like a gypsy, she is attracted to the divinatory arts, as well as camp fires and dancing barefoot. She has three cats who all help her with her magic. Her philosophy about religion and magic is that it must be thoroughly based in science and logic. She is Dianic Wiccan and she is solitary. She blogs at\u00a0silverapplequeen.wordpress.com. She writes about general life, politics and poetry. She is writing a novel about sex, drugs and recovery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/197"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}