two secret uses of the salad spinner

I own a Moulinex salad spinner that has served me for approximately 25 years. It holds vast amounts of goods, has a turning crank and the habit of getting unbalanced.

One turns to get rid of the worst of the moisture, and then the spinner begins to spin and wobble out of control. So one stops, opens the lid and very carefully re-distributes the content until the internal spinner-colander almost balances on the pivot. Then one closes the whole machine very carefully again and the spinning becomes a feast.

Robin has a “good grips” spinner that has no such problems of balance. But it turns slightly slower, so the drying takes more time. So we have two spinners, a slow and safe one, and a battered Ferrari.

I don’t want to write about dry lettuce. We all know that it’s better. There is a nice restaurant in the Gothenburg Brew House in Gårda, called bEAT (yES1) that offers very fine, fancy, hand-hewn salad dressings (in line with their other food, which is most of the time very good). But at lunchtime, they serve their lettuce literally floating in its rinsing water. Quite disgusting really. Matter of one hand of the cook not knowing what the other does. Hope he doesn’t cut himself one of these days.

I want to advertise two alternative uses of the salad spinner.

leftover mangement

Johannes Mario Simmel’s Es muss nicht immer Kaviar sein is a juicy WWII spy novel that, in every other paragraph, features a new and unexpected turn (followed by a bold-face cliff hanger), and supplies cooking recipes throughout. On p. 333 (in the Knaur pocket edition), we learn how, in Paris, Thomas Lieven (the cooking hero) saves a perch that Therese (the clumsy kitchen maid in the service of the banker Ferroud [a crook]), had dropped so it broke apart: He makes a gratin.

“Cook a whole fish, drain it well, discard the skin and the bones and divide it into pieces,” the recipe begins. Then, a lot of other cooking goes on, while the bits of fish get cold - finally they are incorporated into a sauce (white sauce, white mushrooms, capers, white wine, crème fraiche and parmesan) and the whole is put into the oven. Check the finest recipes in your favorite cookbook. They almost always require some preparation on top of another, or the process must be very simple indeed:

Fry the chicken livers in olive oil with the onion rings, add white wine, sage and pepper, mince them using the biggest chef’s knife you have, add breadcrumbs, chopped garlic and parsley etc. etc.;

Slice the turkey breasts in thin layers, bread them thoroughly, fry them in oil, and slice these slivers diagonally as soon as they are cool enough to handle. Put these on top of the salad;

Quickly sear the cubes of tuna and immerse them in a mix of soy sauce with chopped garlic and ginger, while the other preparations go on;

Roast the hippopotamus and set aside to cool.