The Department of Salad Dressing Room 🥗 👗🚪 Plus, You Didn't Forget a Salad, Did You?
We wouldn't dream of telling you how to cook your turkey. But we can still be useful.
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I WAS SO EXHAUSTED by the time I made it to my hotel during my recent trip to Brooklyn that the only thing I could think about was something I knew I was never going to let myself have: Room service!
I really don’t understand why I’m not allowed to order room service. Except that apparently I have the extremely specific personality type that tells me that room service is for kings and movie stars and not for me. Curiously, it also tries to tell me that I am too good for room service. That the mediocre $30 club sandwiches and $11 glasses of cranberry juice are for rich people who probably don’t even know how good a homemade club sandwich can be. Poor things. Also: Poor me.
It’s a terrible, absurd battle that plays out in my brain on a regular basis—an unattractive reverse snobbery that helps me pretend to feel triumphant and virtuous rather than dumb and defeated when I go to bed in a hotel room after a supper of pita chips, 2 Ricola herbal cough drops, and an apple from my purse.
But the spoiled devil Emily and the virtuous angel Emily both disappeared from my shoulders the second I peeped at the menu of my hotel’s restaurant, As You Are. Not only was there a Dragon Bowl, a dish I ordered regularly at the now defunct vegan Mecca Angelica Kitchen, back when I was living in NYC, but the chef who created it was someone whose food I’d always been enamored of from afar, in newspapers and magazines, but had never tried, Camille Becerra, who, it turns out, once worked at Angelica Kitchen.
Her Dragon Bowl was described simply as “coconut grains, beans, kale, roasted carrots, pickles, avocado, sprouts.” I ordered it immediately, without giving it a second thought, along with a side of perfect hand-cut fries (with aioli and ketchup) and a coconut green juice that revitalized my vital spark. I was in heaven for however long it took me to eat every bit of it at the little table in my room, which I began to dream about never leaving—just staying here forever eating Dragon Bowls.
I was particularly taken by the jet-black, slightly spicy, sesame flavored dressing drizzled over it all. So on the morning I left for the airport to return home, I bought a copy of Becerra’s Bright Cooking: Recipes for the Modern Palate in the restaurant and flipped through the pages while I enjoyed a beautiful breakfast of her chicken soup, steamed spinach, and turmeric tonic.
I was thrilled that the recipe for the black sesame dressing was in there, along with Becerra’s guide to the elements of Dragon Bowls (whole grains, orange vegetables, green vegetables, protein, sauce, seaweed, pickle) and so many other gorgeous-looking recipes that I cannot wait to make. I made a batch of the dressing right when I got home, and it was just as delicious as I remembered it, so I wanted you to have the recipe, too, which is below.
Also below! I thought that some of you might just now be realizing you hadn’t planned a salad for your Thanksgiving table. Rather than getting our feelings hurt by this, we are offering a few recipes you might already have the ingredients for; they’re super easy to assemble last minute. And for those of you still willing to run out to the grocery store, see our “Oh, No! We Forgot a Salad!” issue from last year, immediately below. Either way, good luck, and may the odds be ever in your favor.
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*Recipe: Black Sesame-Chili Vinaigrette, from Camille Becerra’s Bright Cooking
Makes 1½ cups
½ cup toasted black sesame seeds (NOTE FROM EMILY: I got mine at H-Mart and toasted them myself—see note on how to do that, below) but they’re also available in grocery store spice sections)
1 teaspoon salt
¾ cup grapeseed oil (NOTE FROM EMILY: you can substitute canola oil or another neutral oil)
¼ cup sesame oil
¼ cup rice vinegar
¼ teaspoon chili powder or urfa pepper flakes (NOTE FROM EMILY: I used my little tin of urfa from Spicewalla)
In a mortar, combine the sesame seeds and salt and pound with the pestle until most of the sesame seeds have been coarsely ground (every seed should be nicked). Transfer to a small bowl and stir in the oils, vinegar, and chili powder or urfa pepper flakes. Use immediately or store at room temperature for 2 weeks or in the refrigerator for 3 months.
USES: This vinaigrette is perfect on a simple salad of chilled leaf lettuces, raw crunchy salads, or crudités. It’s also great drizzled over grain bowls such as the Dragon Bowl in Bright Cooking.
NOTE FROM EMILY: I started out in my mortar and pestle and it was very difficult to make much headway, so I transferred the seeds to my mini food processor and used chop mode, which worked beautifully. If you do this, remember that you are not obliterating them; you’re coarsely grinding them. You don’t want to end up with a paste.
How to toast black sesame seeds
Heat a small skillet over medium heat; add the sesame seeds in a single layer and let them cook for about 20 seconds undisturbed. Lower the heat a bit and continue cooking, stirring them around in the pan until they begin to give off a toasty sesame aroma (you won’t be able to judge by the golden color, obviously), about 3 to 4 minutes. Immediately transfer to a plate to cool.
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*Three Last-Minute Salads for Which You Might Already Have Ingredients:
1. Cherry Tomato and Orange Salad 🍅
2. DOS Four Ps Salad (Pear, Parsley, Pecorino, Pistachios)🍐
3. Marcella Hazan’s Orange and Cucumber Salad🍊 🥒
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🥬 🥬🥬 🥬That’s It! We’re done here! We’ll see you soon with a recipe for authentic Homemade Birdseed Cakes and Fat Balls. I’m kidding—it’s going to be salad.
🥬🥬🥬 ONE MORE THING: Please remember that while you may receive The Department of Salad as an e-mail, all issues of the newsletter—along with any corrections, the archive, and our Fancy New Recipe Index—are always available at the Department of Salad website. (You can always search “The Department of Salad” or go directly to emilyrnunn.substack.com.) All the recipes from all the newsletters will be there for you. To search the Index, simply use the search function (command F) that produces a search bar in the upper-right-hand corner of the page.
🥬 🥬ALSO, I’M WONDERING: Do you follow me on Instagram? My feed is not a consistent array of uniformly styled photos of perfect food, which I know is what I’m supposed to offer. But I get too bored. So it includes videos of giant pandas loudly eating carrots and personal crap representative of my bad personality. I’d love to have you. Go here: Emily’s Instagram
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I love the dragon bowl, and I have everything for that sesame dressing already in the pantry. It's going to be a great option for the roasted veg salad I eat from the couch on Saturday when my kid goes back to college.
Also, for reasons [mostly that kid, but also life], I ended up making thanksgiving dinner on Tuesday with 24 hours notice. We had three salads on the table - a persimmon and manchego one as an appetizer, a raw shaved Brussels sprouts/asparagus/arugula salad and a roasted pumpkin/walnut/collards/pickled onion sort of panzanella freestyle. It was fabulous, and I feel like I tapped into a bit of DoS spirit.
The debate about room service vs a Ricola and an apple from your purse made me laugh out loud! Love that you got fries with the Dragon Bowl, that’s a fine supper!