American Entree
POWEGIAN SALAD
(Poway, my fair city)
INGREDIENTS
6 eggs
3 medium carrots
3 celery stalks
2 garlic cloves
1 white onion
1 tablespoon olive oil
4 ounces fresh spinach
3 avocados
1 large tomato
PREPARATION
Boil eggs eight-to-twelve minutes, depending on your taste for hard-boiled eggs. Remove eggs. Let eggs cool. While eggs are boiling and then cooling, mince carrots, celery, garlic, and onion. Add carrot, celery, garlic, onion, and olive oil to pan and sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens.
Put carrot, celery, garlic, and onion in large bowl. Peel and cut each hard-boiled egg into 4 slices. Peel and remove pits from avocados. Chop avocados into pieces about 1/2″ wide. Dice tomatoes. Add egg, avocado, and tomato to bowl. Gently mix or toss salad with two large spoons. (Do not interpret tossing salad as an command to fling it against the wall. It will not impress your guests, unless they are wildly, really wildly into modern art.) Goes well with all sorts of salad dressings.
1) Spinach is used in this recipe. Spinach made Popeye the Sailor strong. Popeye would have liked this salad. However, this particular recipe does not, as of press time, come ready made in stores.
2) It’s not as if Popeye could stop a vicious fist fight with his nemesis Bluto to go to the supermarket to buy this salad. Bluto would knocked out the iron-deficient Popeye with the old one-two if Popeye had tried to leave the fight. And even if Popeye had to been able to got to the store, he would have need to eat quite a lot of Powegian Salad to have gotten the same amount of spinach as in a can of spinach.
3) And notice Popeye always eats spinach out of a can. The spinach in the can is already cooked. Maybe Popeye doesn’t like fresh spinach.
4) Oh no, I won’t believe that. I won’t. I won’t.. Fresh spinach is so clearly tastier and healthier for you and Popeye than the canned stuff. Popeye wouldn’t lead the youth of America astray. Indeed, I bet he only ate spinach out of a can, because Powegian spinach in a bag wasn’t sold in any store when his cartoons were being made. Yes, that’s it. I feel much better. Carry on.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
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