| Good Saturday morning, friends. What's on your weekend agenda? I'm hoping I can squeeze in a little time to curl up with a book. Goodness knows I have enough material piled up. Current events being what they are, I tend to lean toward lighter fare — I love a good rom-com, what can I say — but my nightstand book stack often includes history. Unsurprisingly, I especially love the intersection of history and food, which is why I was tickled by Aaron Hutcherson's Dinner in Minutes column this week. While I most associate taco salad, and its giant tortilla shell, with the casual restaurants of my youth, Aaron dug deeper, and it turns out this dish has a history with another of my personal interests: Disney parks. (More on that soon!) As Aaron shares from Gustavo Arellano's "Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America," snack king and Frito founder Charles Elmer Doolin persuaded Walt Disney to let him open a restaurant in Disneyland, just months after its 1955 debut. On the menu? You guessed it: a precursor of the taco salad as we know it. Aaron discovered a gut-busting taco salad from The Post's archives in 1965 (yield: 3 gallons), but instead of that formula (3 pounds ground beef, 4 heads lettuce, 4 cups shredded cheddar cheese), he went with a more modern take. His Steak Taco Salad starts with seared, spice-rubbed skirt steak, which is sliced against the grain, piled on a bed of crisp romaine lettuce and topped with a shower of crushed tortilla chips. The pièce de résistance: a bright green avocado dressing, similar to a thinned-out guacamole. Adorn with your favorite toppings, such as beans, corn and pickled jalapeños. There's just enough retro appeal to play to the nostalgia, though it's dressed up in a contemporary package. Ellie Krieger also looked to the past with Vegetarian Borshch With Sauerkraut, a recipe from the new cookbook "Russ & Daughters: 100 Years of Appetizing." "Appetizing" shops were a staple of New York in the early 1900s, so named because they specialized in the ready-to-eat fare you could graze on as part of a kosher, meat-free spread. Russ & Daughters is one of the few remaining holdouts, connected to a culinary heritage that Ellie inherited from her grandfather. This Old-World soup speaks to that history, featuring simmered beets, cabbage, carrot and onion, along with a generous dose of tangy sauerkraut. The Khoresht-e Karafs (Persian Celery Stew) that Daniela Galarza featured from cookbook author Yasmin Khan is a similar nod to tradition. This Persian dish typically contains lamb or beef, but Khan cleverly swaps in canned borlotti (cranberry) beans for a quicker, meatless take. Never again let that bunch of celery in your fridge go to waste. Alas, Carrie Allan's Ectoplasm Punch doesn't have much of a historical peg — that is, unless you, like me, were a child of the '80s and its "Ghostbusters" mania. ("Who you gonna call?") Carrie's neon-green, Halloween-appropriate drink made with melon liqueur, lime juice and cream of coconut takes inspiration from the hit film's ghostly co-star, Slimer, and has a trick up its sleeve, too. Both the tonic water and vitamin B2 (a.k.a. riboflavin) will glow under black light, the tools for which you can purchase at a party-supply store. Setting the pitcher inside a bowl filled with dry ice brings more spooky vibes. Need other ideas for Halloween or other entertaining? Join Aaron and me in our live weekly cooking chat Wednesday at noon Eastern. Send along your questions now, then return when we kick off the conversation. Until next time, happy cooking. |
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