I crave color these days, even though the weather has been mostly bright and sunny. A batch of my roasted red pepper and almond dip, made last summer and frozen, brightened me for a few days. I was about to thaw another one, when, in the freezer, I found a container of roasted Round of Hungary peppers, also from last summer.
I thawed them and used them to make half a batch of the roasted red pepper and almond dip substituting almonds (mandorle) with cashews (anacardi). I like the result: I detect the flavor of cashews in the background of the peppers.
Although I like them a lot, I have never used cashews in my kitchen. That's about to change, thanks to a collection of recipes focused on cashews that I received recently. In the meantime, having cashews in the kitchen gave me the idea of trying them in a known recipe.
The photo above is from last year, but I have a few plants like that in my vegetable garden now: I love the bicolored leaves. I also harvested some potatoes a few days ago, which screamed to be boiled and turned into a salad. Some were Purple Majesty and some of a pale-fleshed variety I don't remember (you can see it in the photo in this post). I selected the smallest ones and added to them, for variety's sake, a couple of red-skinned, white-fleshed potatoes from Warren Creek Farms (the same farm where I get the beautiful beans you've seen featured in several recent posts).
Based on how well the red pepper dip had worked as pasta sauce for my chestnut flour gnocchetti, I decided to use the cashew version as potato salad dressing. With a couple of small adjustments, it worked quite nicely. I am giving here the ingredients I used for a salad for two, but it is easy to increase them to match the number of people you wish to serve.
Ingredients:
- 10.5 oz. / 300 g new potatoes
- Fine sea salt, to taste
- 2 tablespoons roasted red pepper and almond dip made using cashews instead of almonds (see note below)
- 1 teaspoon olive oil of good quality
- Sherry vinegar, to taste
Note: cashews are sold already skinned, so no blanching + skinning is required. Toast them in the oven until golden. Carefully monitor them while they are in the oven to avoid burning.
Scrub the potatoes and boil them in a pot of water until tender. Drain, cool and cube to obtain bite-size pieces. Season lightly with salt. Add the dip, olive oil and a touch of vinegar and toss lightly but thoroughly.
Let the salad rest before serving. If you refrigerate it, take it out ahead of time so it is not eaten cold.
This is a light and lovely salad, perfect served for dinner after a bowl of winter squash soup (recipe to be published soon, I hope).
This is my contribution to No Croutons Required, a monthly vegetarian soup and salad challenge hosted jointly by Jacqueline of Tinned Tomatoes and Lisa of Lisa's Kitchen. Jacqueline is the host for February and she chose potato salad as theme.
This post contains the roundup of the event.
Click on the button to hear me pronounce the Italian words mentioned in the post:
insalata di patate con salsa cremosa di peperoni e anacardi
or launch the insalata di patate con salsa cremosa di peperoni e anacardi audio file [mp3].
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