Celebration Dinner

After a very busy season on campus I had my students leaders over for dinner to celebrate all the hard work we had put in and Brian and I planned a great menu.

Pork Paillards with Sour Cream-Paprika Sauce from a previous blog post.
Ugly Ducking Salad - Aarti Party ( a new show on food network)
A dessert ( See next blog post)

Brian worked on the pork while I tackled the salad




The ugly duckling is called such because it contains celery root, possibly the ugliness vegetable I have ever seen. It reminds we of a Mandrake, from Harry Potter. Celery root is actual celery but grow to be the root from the the green stalks.

I started the salad by making the dressing. The first step, shelling the pistachios and then toasting them. I should have bought pre-shelled pistachios because I had the shell over 30. The toasting only took a few minutes and I could tell that they were done when you started to smell very tasty.

I then placed the pistachios in a blender with garlic, lemon juice, hot sauce, oil and hot water, to help with the break down of the nuts. The result was a really really thick brown sludge, which was not very appetizing or dressing like. So I added more water and oil until the paste thinned. I then prepped the rest of the salad, spinach apples and the celery root. The spinach was prepacked and Andrea, one of my students, helped me cut the apple. Then I turned to the celery root. Celery root browns very easily when exposed to air like potatoes or apples. I peeled the celery root and then grated it. It took a long time to grate that very large celery root and eventually Joel, another student took over and finished the job. He grated at a much faster rate. Then i toasted it all together and dinner was served.