Book Sale Finds & Bread Salad

Some of the best cookbooks we own were purchased at Library Used Book Sales. Getting a $30.00 book for $2.00 is always fun and even if you only find one great recipe in the book it is well worth cost. That is true of The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: A Compendium of Recipes & Cooking Lessons from San Francisco’s Beloved Restaurant by Judy Rodgers. I am sure we have found more than one recipe from this book but the one we have gone back to many times is Zuni Roast Chicken with Bread Salad. Probably the first time we made it we dutifully followed the instructions. But in subsequent preparations the base of the recipe is used with lots of substitutions and variations. Judy Rodgers would have you roast your own chicken and she wasn’t keen on using sourdough bread. But we picked up a roasted chicken at our local grocery and we had just bought a beautiful country sourdough loaf so that’s what we used. It also made it possible to have this salad for dinner even though we didn’t start till very late in the day.

Here are the instructions for the salad we concocted taking many liberties with Chef Rodgers marvelous recipe.

Breast meat from a take-out roasted chicken
4 ounces slightly stale, open-crumbed peasant style bread
2 Tbs olive oil
1 1/2 Tbs Champagne vinegar or white wine vinegar
Salt and freshly cracked black pepper
1 Tbs golden raisins
1/4 C black raspberries
1 Tbs. red wine or sherry vinegar
1/2 nectarine, cut into 1/2 inch chunks
2 Tbs pine nuts
2-3 garlic cloves
1/4 C slivered scallions
2 Tbs lightly salted chicken stock (I used the juice that accumulated in the roast chicken package)
A few handfuls of arugula, frisee or other greens (We used romaine and baby Swiss chard)

Tear the bread into 1″ chunks. Cut off the bottom crust. Toss with olive oil and saute in a dry pan till crisp and lightly colored. You want about 2 cups.

Combine about 1T olive oil with the vinegar and salt and pepper to taste. Toss about 1/4 of this with the torn bread in a wide salad bowl. The bread will be unevenly coated. Taste one that is mostly saturated, if bland, add some S & P and toss again.

Place the raisins and the nectarine pieces in the red wine vinegar and warm water and set aside.

Place the pine nuts in a small saute pan and heat for a minute or two, just to warm and lightly toast. Add them to the bowl with the bread.

Put a spoonful of olive oil in a small skillet, add the garlic and scallions and cook over a medium-low heat, stirring constantly until softened. Scrape into the bread and fold to combine. Drain the raisins and nectarine and fold in. Dribble some chicken stock over the salad and fold again. Finally add the black raspberries and fold gently.

Cut your chicken into pieces. We just used the breast and did rough slices.

Toss the bread mix with the greens and dress with another drizzle of viniagrette and fold again. S & P to taste.

Finally spread the salad on to a platter, lay the chicken on top and serve. Depending on how hungry you are, it serves 2 as a main course.

So next time your local library has a book sale, go the first day before things get picked over and head immediately to the cookbooks. There are treasures there and a lot of good eating.