Artichoke Salad Sun-Dried Tomatoes Olives Recipe.

Artichoke Salad

This dish was just born yesterday. I tried it on a large group we hosted last night. If the way it was demolished is any indication, then I conclude it is fantastic. Well worth sharing with all of you!

Artichoke Salad: much more than just a salad!

It is loaded with colorful, filling and satisfying ingredients, so it can very easily turn into main course. I will include Main Dish variations.

Your Pantry is Everything

With the perfect choice of pantry staples, this artichoke salad, and indeed countless terrific dishes, come together in no time. A great pantry is your best kitchen companion: it lays the foundation for the perfect dish each time, and makes you look like a pro just as often.

This Artichoke Salad is the perfect example for what you can do at the drop of a hat

⏺ Sun-Dried Tomatoes: I buy slivered sun-dried tomatoes  inexpensively, then pack them in jars, covered with olive oil. Packing them in oil yourself, instead of buying them already packed in oil, is a snap and saves you a bundle. And the infused oil is delicious. So many wonderful things you can make with the strips, oil and all.

⏺ Pitted calamata olives Here too, you plan ahead and get your reward with dips, pasta and more. Pitted olives will seem somewhat more expensive, but because it is all olive and no pit, pitted olives are actually a good buy for recipes that call for them. And in my opinion, unless you are serving a bowl of olives to eat out of hands, where presentation counts, you are always better off using pitted.

⏺ Artichokes. Frozen artichoke bottoms  are increasingly available, but Canned artichoke bottoms are a decent close second.

⏺ Roasted red peppers. Roasting peppers can be time consuming and expensive, so using minimally processed bottled roasted peppers is a great alternative. These (linked) are very inexpensive, come in strips, red peppers and yellow peppers. Not using the whole jar? Pack the remainder in a jar, and cover with oil. Remember that the oil you pack ingredients in is never lost and is always used, with the added great flavor that develops from the infusion.

Sun-dried tomatoes, olives, artichokes, roasted peppers? All in the pantry? What’s not to love?  Take a look at my pasta recipe here, using all four ingredients. How about my chummus recipe, made with one of these magical ingredients?

Yesterday I was determined to compose a new dish using these four ingredients as the core. All others I used are, shall we say, modular.  The finished artichoke salad was a triumph.

Mini New Potatoes

I couldn’t resist the adorable potatoes I found at the market yesterday; they were tiniest than tiny, no bigger than olives. They took at most five minutes to cook, that’s how tender they were. But of course any small potatoes will do.

Ingredients

Salad

• 1 cup oil-packed sun dried tomato strips, oil and all
• 1 cup frozen and thawed artichoke bottoms, quartered (canned OK)
• 1 cup roasted red peppers, bottled OK, cut in strips
• 1 cup pitted calamata or other good quality olives
• 1 cup finely chopped cauliflower
• 1 cup fresh or frozen and thaw corn kernels
• 3 cups unpeeled cooked small new potatoes, cut in half or quarters, depending on size  (leave whole if they are very small

Dressing

• 1/4 wine vinegar
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tablespoon oregano, or a little more to taste
• ground pepper to taste
• good pinch red pepper flakes
• 2-3 tablespoons tiny capers

Do not add salt, as the olives, capers and sun-dried tomatoes have enough salt to season the whole dish.

Add a little olive oil if the ingredients need a little more, in addition to oil included in the sun-dried tomatoes

Instructions