TO REACH USFare Exchange is a longtime meeting place for people who love to cook and love to eat. We welcome both your recipes and your requests. Be sure to include precise instructions for every recipe you send.• Mailing address: Jane Henegar, 913 Mount Olive Road, Lookout Mountain, GA 30750• E-mail: chattfare@gmail.com
Jane HenegarGood morning, readers. You will find seeds in some teaspoons’ abundance in today’s Exchange, beginning with this request for recipes using chia seeds or suggestions for using chia seeds. Add to that this musing: How does one use and combine, in vinaigrettes and elsewhere, the flavored olive oils and vinegars now available in local markets and by mail order?
Goldie Washington begins with an item in her cupboard: chia seeds. “I bought a package of chia seeds on sale, but now don’t know what to do with them.”
Washington continued, and here I paraphrase: In a certain home, occupied by certain expert cooks, one entire two-shelf section of the kitchen is devoted to flavored vinegars and a few olive oil flavors thrown in as well. How do you know which flavors to mix? Is such flavor subtle, or must the cook proceed with caution? Can two flavors of salad ingredients – say, the cherry vinegar and the basil oil – clash and cause a commotion that is not good for the health of the salad? Expert advice is needed.
Vivian Chaij included seeds of three varieties in her potato salad that calls for no mayonnaise, toasts them in a skillet, then crushes them, before adding to the vinaigrette.