Culinary author Linda Steidel

Linda Steidel

Linda Steidel in her kitchen prepares a salad of fresh vegetables she selects from visiting the local farmers markets in the South Bay.

Culinary author Linda Steidel is bucking a very well established trend: here in the land of the endless summer, she would like to remind us that there are three other quarters of the year with merits of their own.

“I want to bring the seasons back. We’re lucky in California, no question. We can get vegetables all year, but do the items that are trucked in taste as good as the ones that are fresh and local? No. If you follow the seasons, use what our farmers are producing and bringing into the markets, you don’t have to have a lot of ingredients, but what you have will taste better than anything else.”

The recipes in Linda’s first book, “For Every Season, There Is A Salad,” stray from traditional American ideas – there are Middle Eastern and Asian recipes alongside original creations. From this you might figure that Linda was exposed to all manner of ideas about how to start a meal when she was young. In fact, it was quite the opposite – she is from one of the least sophisticated places in America.

“I grew up in West Texas, and there was no thought put into salad. Iceberg lettuce, maybe a little shaved carrot, a piece of tomato that had been in the refrigerator for a week and had no flavor, and bottled dressing. I only started eating salad after I moved to New York. I traveled a lot in Europe after that – I was a flight attendant – and I was exposed to a multitude of things I had never had before.”

By the time she retired from the airlines, Linda had a new passion for food, and she eventually became a chef and culinary teacher. Salads were not her focus – in fact, they were a problem.

“When I started teaching, I didn’t know how to make them or what to do with them, and it wasn’t too important to me either. Then I started going to farmers markets and discovering all these ingredients, and I started trying things. I would mix the salad in a bowl but put it out on a huge platter, so I could compose the salad on the platter, and when I did, people started eating the salad. They could see what was in it, it looked more attractive and visually appealing. It became a challenge and a lot of fun.”

Since farmers markets awakened her interest in salads, she includes them when teaching others to cook. Linda teaches at the Williams-Sonoma store in Palos Verdes, and visits to markets have an impact on her students.

“Once I get them there, they recognize the difference. At a supermarket days are lost in distribution, but at a farmers market most of what’s there was picked that morning. You can taste as you go through the farmers markets, so you really have a feel for what you’re getting.”

The supply is not always predictable at farmers markets; unlike grocery stores, if the vegetables aren’t fresh, they aren’t there. This presents a problem for some students, who are fixated on replicating her recipes and afraid to deviate from what is written down.

“I try to teach my students to be flexible, which is difficult…sometimes you have to work with what you have or can get.  They want to follow the recipes exactly; they ask, “How much is a pinch?” They’re very specific, and I want to encourage them to be experimental.”

Most of those outdoor markets are only open during the day, which is fine for those who don’t have a job but an obstacle for those who have to be at a desk from 9 to 5. Busy people may have to make compromises, buy from chain stores, and decide where freshness makes the most difference. Tomatoes are an obvious example – anyone can tell the difference between a local tomato and an unripe one trucked hundreds of miles – but what other ingredients are a priority?

“I make sure my students use fresh herbs – a recipe may call for only a teaspoon of fresh herbs, but there’s a huge difference between using fresh and dried. The other place where quality ingredients count is the vinaigrette. You have to have really good olive oil, sherry or red wine vinegars from Spain. Good balsamic vinegar as opposed to a mediocre one makes all the difference in the world. I would never compromise – spend your money there. The storage with oils and vinegars is easy, just keep them in a cool, dark place as you would wine.”

Many of the salads in this book don’t actually call for a vinaigrette, or any conventional dressing.  The chili-buttermilk dressing that adorns a shrimp cobb salad uses neither vinegar or oil, and others like the rice salad with peppers and beans are at the boundary of salads and vegetable dishes.

“I think I did stretch the definition of a salad in order to make it more appealing to people who don’t usually eat them. Adding chicken or beef or shrimp turns them into a fine main course for some times of year. In winter I like heartier, spicier food, which is why the Thai beef salad is in that section. I think cooler, fresher, more natural flavors fit summer. Winter calls for big flavors.”

That theme of seasonality runs through the book, which has recipes for every weather. Tomatoes are conspicuously absent in winter, when good ones are unavailable, but Linda offers many alternatives.

“What I do in winter is turn to stovetop grilling – sweet potatoes and squash are wonderful in a salad. Is it the same consistency as a tomato? No, but it adds sweetness to a salad the way a tomato does. I love caramelizing pears and adding that with toasted walnuts, and grilled peppers become very sweet and are available all the time.”

The theme has proved popular, and Linda is almost finished with another book on seasonal pastas and is contemplating books on soups and fish. The latter will be even more of a stretch for someone with her upbringing.

“I grew up in West Texas eating only one kind of fish – fried catfish, that’s all we had. When I moved to New York and then California there were all kinds that I had never seen before, and I had to figure out what to do with them. It’s easy to overcook fish while you’re learning, and I used to do it every time.”

Her own experiences make Linda a sympathetic teacher for students with limited – or nonexistent — cooking experience, and she has a few horror stories about meals gone awry.

“I went to someone’s home to cook a meal, and she had two ovens. Neither one worked – she hadn’t turned them on in at least a year. We had to make a formal multi-course dinner, and after panicking, I started thinking, ‘I’ve got to make this work’. We had to do everything on top of the stove. It turned out great, but for me the evening was terrible. Things like that happen up here – people buy houses with grand kitchens, all for show. I had a class in one woman’s house and she had a brand new stove that she had never turned on. There was a piece missing from her convection oven, a filter, and she didn’t know. I put a cake in there and when I took it out, the fan had blown the batter all over the bottom of the oven. There’s no way to fix that, no way.”

Linda’s Steidel’s book is bringing  her increased exposure, and a new influx of people interested in her classes.

“Some people enroll just so they can tell their friends they’re taking a cooking class. Others are engaged, but doing it for all kinds of reasons. There are a lot of women whose children are all grown, and they take up cooking as a hobby, for entertaining. A lot of men take my classes, too. Some people have been taking my classes for 17 years, and I’m always trying to find new things to bring them back.”

Linda isn’t so involved with her own cooking that she doesn’t have time to dine out. Of local restaurants, she singles out two local establishments for their great salads.

“My favorite salad in the whole South Bay is at Mar’Sel at Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes. They used asparagus and squashes with this tarragon vinaigrette, and the presentation was wonderful. I’m going to try to copy it – I loved it! The other place I’d recommend is Petros for their Greek salad – it has all the flavors of fresh vegetables plus a beautiful presentation. He does an amazing job with fish, too.”

So does Linda ever leave this cosmopolitan area to visit Texas, and are her relatives there experimenting with salads too? She laughs at the thought.

“They’re still eating iceberg lettuce with cold tomatoes. In West Texas, they just don’t have good quality fruit and vegetables. They stay with what they know.”

“For Every Season, There Is A Salad” is published by Brio Press. PEN

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