This is a simple, delicious salad/lunch that you can make any season with the most wonderful local vegetables and greens you can find. With Claudia Roden, we shared our happiness that boiling vegetables have at last become the IN thing to do! Our book editors, until recently, had stricken out of our recipes the mere mention of boiling any vegetable or green, replacing it by ‘blanching’ or ‘steaming…’ Read more
Potatoes, carrots and a couple of onions are boiled first, in a pot with 1-2 teaspoons salt, until tender and easily pierced with a fork.
We discard nothing in our part of the world, and we have learned that for example the root-ends of spinach are delicious when fresh, especially from ours, or the local gardens, so we carefully wash them, and boil them for a few minutes longer than we boil the large fleshy spinach leaves. Baby spinach is not what you need for this delicious salad.
We boil zucchini by themselves, usually, in a separate pot, with their hard stems still attached. We discard them when done, because if we cut them before boiling, the water seeps into the zucchini flesh, making the tender zucchini unacceptably soggy.
Boiled zucchini are often made into a salad/side dish by themselves, all through the season, as gardens all over Greece are overflowed by this beloved early summer vegetable. And of course zucchini feature in lots of meze and main course dishes, of which my favorite is Zucchini Fritters, as well as the fabulous Crustless Zucchini Pie.
Finally the boiled vegetable salad, after being drizzled with fruity olive oil and some lemon juice, is complemented with tangy Tahini Yogurt Sauce, the same that flavors the Roasted Squash and Bread Salad.
I serve the boiled vegetables with some chopped, pickled hot peppers, and plenty of fresh mint leaves.
