The craving for vibrant produce is intense this time of year, as the wait for asparagus, peas and tender greens drags on. So here’s a menu for anyone looking for those bright, fresh notes.
It begins with a colorful salad that takes cues from Vietnam. Made with reliable hothouse cucumbers, smaller and sweeter carrots, cabbage and herbs, it can even be slightly garish in appearance if you use purple cabbage. Ordinary cabbage is just fine, but if you can find napa — lately I’ve been buying a beautiful magenta-hued variety — so much the better. The dressing, a zippy mixture of garlic, ginger, sesame oil, fish sauce, lime juice and chopped jalapeño, makes it all shine.
It’s not the kind of salad that’s best eaten separately. Instead, it’s an ideal spicy accompaniment to roast chicken, grilled meat or fish, or baked sweet potatoes. For this meal, it pairs beautifully with chicken breasts baked in pastry, which sound impossibly fussy but are, in fact, quite simple to prepare. I recommend using store-bought puff pastry, but, if you want to make your own, any flaky pastry or pie dough works well.
The only tedious part is making sure the chicken breasts are the same size and thickness. Small boneless chicken breasts need only a little trimming, but, if all you can find are large ones, cut them into four 6-ounce pieces, an easy butchering project. (Save any scraps for a stir-fry or freeze them to add to a future stock.)
Season the breasts generously — I used five-spice powder — and coat with a mixture of crème fraîche and mustard. Then, wrap them in pastry, paint with egg wash and bake the packages until golden. This method, in addition to looking lovely, guarantees a perfectly juicy chicken breasts, often not easy to achieve. They’re a gorgeous sight alongside the spicy salad.
I don’t always feel like making dessert and am often happy to pass a bowl of fruit, say, tangerines or mandarins. I might also pass a plate of store-bought candied ginger, an easy flourish.
But for this dinner, a refreshing frozen dessert seemed right, so I whipped up a little sherbet with tangerine juice and yogurt. It can be quickly made in an ice cream maker if you have one. Otherwise, put the mixture in a bowl and pop it into the freezer, stirring every 30 minutes or so — a longer process to be sure, but effective. Serve the sherbet in hollowed-out tangerine “cups” or scooped into glasses. No one will complain if that candied ginger makes its way to the table, too.
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