The following recipe is from the November 4 edition of our weekly recipe newsletter. To receive this newsletter in your inbox, sign up here!
The recipes in New Classic Family Dinners by Mark Peel are, at their heart, restaurant recipes adapted for the ease of home cooks. They range in difficulty levels from beginner to very advanced. But even the most simple recipe includes a few extra steps that prove to be infinitely beneficial to home cooks.
This recipe for Green Bean Salad with Walnuts is nothing more than blanched green beans with a lemony vinaigrette, but hidden in the instructions are a few tips that only someone with years of kitchen experience can bring to the table. Peel recommends that you blanch the lemon zest to counter any bitterness that it might bring to the vinaigrette. Freshly shelled walnuts taste pretty good on their own, but toasting them and adding the smallest amount of walnut oil brings out their nuttiness. Finally, and probably my newest and most favorite trick that I've learned from Peel, briefly soaking raw onions does wonders to eliminate any overly pungent onion aromas in dishes that call for raw onions.
Combining all of these chef-worthy techniques makes for a green bean salad that might take a little longer than you are used to, but is well worth it. These few extra steps ensure that all of the flavors are not only balanced but heightened to new levels.
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