Are you looking for new, easy ways to use seasonal produce in salads you’ll actually crave? What if they could be meal prep-friendly?
In this bite-sized episode, we share delicious moments about the best things we ate this week to inspire each other – and you!
By the end of this episode, you’ll want to try make-ahead and entertaining-friendly salads, including a vibrant one with Napa cabbage. You’ll also discover a tried and true recipe for a classic French chicken liver pâté that’s perfect for parties and date nights.
Tune in for a quick dose of home cooking inspiration!
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Links:
Chicken-liver pâté by Javier Huerta adapted by Sam Sifton for NYT Cooking (unlocked) – https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015975-chicken-liver-pate?unlocked_article_code=1.008.JaFN.RN5cyTEmlCql&smid=share-url
Sonya’s salads: Fennel, apple and pomegranate salad, coleslaw, a Moroccan carrot salad similar to the one from the workshop, and you can find the zucchini, za’atar, quinoa salad in Sonya’s cookbook: Braids – https://www.sonyasanford.com/recipes/2025/9/28/make-ahead-friendly-fall-fennel-apple-celery-pomegranate-salad | https://www.sonyasanford.com/book
Canelle Vanille’s Purple Napa Cabbage Salad that inspired Kari’s – https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQZVAtIESbX/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link, which she made with orange bell pepper, shaved beet, celery, feta, and the champagne vinaigrette from her Nicoise
Salad – https://foodfriendspodcast.substack.com/p/sunday-salad-a-french-nicoise-gets
Sonya’s take on a purple Napa cabbage salad – https://sonyasanford.substack.com/p/cooking-for-community
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Welcome to Food Friends, a podcast inspiring home cooks to try new dishes in the kitchen by sharing trusted recipes, tips, and friendship. Hi, I’m Sonia. And I’m Carrie. We met in Los Angeles over 15 years ago as personal chefs and haven’t stopped talking about food since. We’re so glad you’re here. Thanks for being our food friend. If you enjoyed our podcast, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share this episode with friends. We love hearing from you, so follow us on Instagram or drop us a line at foodfriendspodcast.com. Yes, we’d love to hear from you and your food friends. Happy cooking and eating. Hi, Sonia. Hi, Carrie. Sonia, what was your best bite this week? My best bite might surprise you. It was chicken liver pate that I made myself. Stop it. Really? Okay, I have to give some context. Wait, hold on. Have you made Wait, I have so many questions. Have you made chicken liver pate before? We made it at my restaurant, a kind of similar pate, but I haven’t made it at home since. I’ve made chopped liver and I’ve made vegetarian pate many times since, but I actually hadn’t made like a classic French style chicken liver pate since 2019, basically. And the reason I was making it is, you know, I have this client. She’s a doctor. She eats a lot of meat and protein and vegetables, too. And she was saying, “Sonia, I’d like to have more chicken liver in my diet cuz it’s really nutrient mineral rich and has a lot of iron.” And I was like, “Sure.” She’s like, “Can you try make me some pate?” I was like, “Done. I’ll do it.” Which I kind of love about private chefing. They’re like, “Oh, I’m just going to pull that recipe out of my back pocket. Like, no big deal. I’ve never made pate.” But don’t you didn’t you love as a private chef when your client would give you a request and it made you cook something you wouldn’t normally have made? And that’s how this felt. That is probably the thing I loved the absolute most about being a personal chef and that I find to be the hardest about being a home cook is because I would eat anything. I love it when people with dietary restrictions come to my house cuz I’m like, “Put me in a box. Help me think about this differently.” Otherwise, I just stand in my kitchen and look at my husband. I’m like, “What are we going to eat?” That’s right. Yeah, it’s really fun to try new things and think of things differently. So, I went to a recipe that I have used before that I think is just one of these recipes that work and is really actually uncomplicated. So, chicken liver pate sounds very fancy. It sounds very complicated. It’s so actually kind of simple. This is a recipe that was from Javier Warta but adapted by Sam Sifton. It’s in the New York Times cooking. It has over a thousand five-star reviews. So, it’s one of those highly rated, not just highly reviewed. People tested this recipe. People have tested this recipe. So, you take some butter and shallots. You cook them in a pan and it’s very descriptive. The recipe is so easy to follow. It tells you you let it get foamy and then you just wait till the shallots are translucent, not brown. And at that moment, you add the livers. And I also think like sometimes people think chicken liver can be hard to source. I find it’s a lot easier to find than it used to be. I typically find it at Whole Foods or a similar market and often they have it in the frozen section if you can’t find it in the fresh section and it’s actually pretty affordable which is surprising to me cuz not that many people want it which makes sense. So you add those chicken livers to the shallots and that butter and then you add madera or port. So a sweet wine. I think port is a lot easier to find so that’s what I typically use. And you cook it on high and you’re cooking it fast and high. It’s going to take about 5 minutes and you’re looking for the liquid to reduce. The chicken liver will start to brown, but it stays a little pink in the center. And some people think that means it’s like undercooked and it’s not. You don’t want to overcook your chicken liver. That’s kind of the main thing about cooking chicken liver is that will retain some pinkness. Then you throw that into a food processor and then you add more butter, cubed cold butter. That’s part of pate. And you add a little bit of heavy cream and you blitz it. You salt and pepper it. You put it in the fridge and you let it set and then you eat it on a cracker or a piece of crusty bread or something. I honestly don’t love that. You probably don’t like it. I was like, “This is not your flavor.” But if you grew up with chopped liver and you aren’t keeping strict kosher cuz this is mixing meat and dairy, then you probably would like pate. It is like a very acquired taste. I don’t think this recipe is for everyone. I think it’s really just for people who might be looking to get some more liver into their diet, might enjoy pate or be curious about it, might enjoy chopped liver and want a different method. So you can serve it with crackers is typical or the baguette. We also at the restaurant always served it with a little bit of pickles or mustard and we would do cornishon or even pickled currants. Pickled fruit is really nice with pate. Sometimes people will serve a little preserved fruit with pate. Sonia, this is making me think about though I’m not a pate lover, but this doesn’t actually sound that hard to make. No. If you were to make this and take it to someone’s house or to take it to a potluck or take it to a group gathering, especially the people who love to eat pate, it’s like it feels so fancy, even though it really isn’t. I mean, you could really impress your friends. You can make this days ahead of time and keep in your fridge, which I do like for holiday entertaining. Just something that you can whip out and feel special. Know your audience. And and on that note, I had a much more crowd-pleasing best bite that I just want to share with you cuz I haven’t talked to you about it. I recently taught a class about seasonal salads, but I went to the south where like this time of year they’re still growing all kinds of produce. It’s a lot warmer than here. Kind of like California. You guys have a ton of produce year round. This is a total opposite of pate. This was for a brunch. So, as a group, we all made a series of salads and then I put them out as a spread. And I brought some locks from Portland to the south. Some of my favorite smoked locks from the smokery from my friend Michael Jacobs. We bought some local sourdough. We cut that up. We had some butter on the side and then just salads. And I was like, “Wow, for entertaining, this really works.” Especially, I think this time of year, not every hosting event is at night. Sometimes you’re having people for a brunch. Sometimes you’re having guests who are staying in town. And also, sometimes you want a lighter meal. So, that’s why it’s a contrast to pate. Yeah. So, what I’m so curious, what were you, By the way, a meal with pate, bread, and salad sounds like a great brunch. Well, that wouldn’t be bad either. Lunch. Yes. Yeah. But what were some of the salads? What we did is it was a whole group of people and everyone split up into four groups and each group made a salad. So, there was a fennel, pomegranate, celery, apple salad with lots of fresh parsley and mint. That was one salad that was really colorful and bright. Then we did a Moroccan carrot salad which you make with cooked carrots that came from my friend drawer. He shared his recipe with me that has a lot of cumin, cilantro, lemon juice. It’s actually quite simple. And garlic. Then one table made a quinoa, roasted zucchini, zatar, lemon vinegrett salad, which I hadn’t had in a while. It’s a recipe from my cookbook, and I was reminded of like, oh yeah, this is so fun. And basil is added to that. Fresh basil. And it’s just so easy to take a bunch of different zucchini squash, roast it off, cook off some quinoa, toss it together in this very acidic and zatar infused dressing makes it a little different. And basil and zatar go really well together. That like tartness of the zatar and sweet of the basil. Well, the zatar is quite earthy. It can be an acquired taste, too, but you add a lot of lemon juice to it. So, yes, that’s where the acidity comes in and then that kind of floral basily note. And then the last table made a Slavic cabbage salad which is essentially like a kleslaw but with fewer ingredients and lots of lime juice in the recipe which is not traditional but is my take on it. And it was such a hit even the cabbage salad. People are always skeptical of the cabbage salad or the kleslaw and it always is the first thing to go. And we had some egg salad also pre-made and the spread and the plate was so colorful. It was like a rainbow when you put every little salad on it. A lot of these salads you can make days in advance and a meal can be a spread of salads. Absolutely. This was your kleslaw recipe, correct? It’s not my klela, but it’s very similar to my klelaw. It has fewer. It has a little bit of mayonnaise in it and that all that lime juice and I made that recently and was blown away by how good it is. And I’m a person who’s always like, how could I get a bag of pre-shredded cabbage, carrots, whatever, and just kind of throw together a a klelaw? And when I made your recipe, I was so surprised by how much better it is. And it gets better over time in the fridge, too. That’s what I love about this. These are all make every single salad as a make ahead salad, which I think again this time of year, having things that you can make ahead is so helpful. So, Carrie, what was your best bite of the week? Well, I think you’re also going to be surprised, Sonia, because my best bite of the week was a cabbage salad. I’m loving that. It really made me think of you. I was at Whole Foods doing my regular shop. Our Whole Foods has become very standard with what they offer. They don’t offer a lot of extra special seasonal items like they used to, but I noticed that they had a purple nappa cabbage, and I was like, “Wait, is that purple nappa cabbage? I have to buy this because I want to encourage them I want to encourage them to have these special items. So I brought it home. I stuck it in my fridge and I didn’t know what to do with it. Then there was a gathering that was happening with my son and his friends and a group of parents. Someone was like, I’m going to bring this and I’m going to have pizza and I said I’ll bring a salad. And then I thought, what salad am I going to make? And so I saw on Instagram that there’s this creator, her name is Aaron Goyaga. Her handle is Canel A Vanil and I’ve admired her work for years, but she had this really great video and it started off with, “I’m going to make a purple napid cabbage salad. I’m going to show you how to do it.” So, just as you had this already sitting in your fridge, the universe was like, “You should make a salad with that with that purple nappa cabbage.” What’s funny is I literally beyond the purple nappa cabbage, I didn’t follow her recipe at all because she had a different dressing and a bunch of things that I just didn’t have. And I thought, you know what? I’m just gonna use what I’ve got in my crisper drawer. I had orange peppers, which orange with that purple are so beautiful. I also had, and I don’t know why what possessed me to do this, but I bought an orange beet, and so I shaved that very thinly, as you have taught me how to do over the years. Her recipe had a lot of apples in it, and it had a rotisserie chicken in it. So, I did apples, celery, orange beets, orange peppers. There were tons of herbs in her recipe. I had tons of parsley and mint so I cut them up. And then I also had a champagne vinegrett which I had had in my fridge for a couple of months and so I used that and I had a brick of feta. Wait, I didn’t see like sometimes you drop knowledge on me that stops me. So you had made a champagne vinegar vinegaret at some point and you kept it in your fridge. You made extra. I didn’t even realize it would last for a few months. Oh, it did. I thought I need to get this moving through. I took all those vegetables, cut them all up. I cut up a couple of apples and I tossed them in lemon juice and then drained them. And so I added that to the salad. So there was like this lemoniness. I took the jar of the vinegrett and I took the brick of feta and I threw it in my salad bowl and I took it over to my friend’s house and tossed it together. We were kind of chatting and everyone was kind of eating or whatever. Then there was something that took our attention away. There was like a performance and then we kind of all went back to the table an hour or two later and someone kept taking the tortilla chips and dipping them scooped salad and we finished the salad in like 5 minutes or there was a salad recipe which we can link and then for the listener they can take any kind of cabbage if you can’t find purple any nappa cabbage some shaved beet of any color some bell pepper of any color some apples Toss some lemon, celery, celery, and basically whatever vegetables you want. Toss it all together. Make sure you have some fresh parsley and mint or some herbs. It sounds like you cut it up finely enough that it could be scooped with the chip. And that makes for a great salad on a spread and a brick of feta. And a brick of feta. It adds so much salty brininess. It was beautiful. I have a couple pictures. I’ll share them on our Instagram. Food friends. What really inspired me was she posted this video with the purple cabbage and I just thought I’m going to take that as a sign that I should make a purple cabbage salad and I made my own version of it. But her recipe also looks really delicious. So her salad was the same purple nappa cabbage and apples, but she also had rotisserie chicken and a zatar dressing that had a lot of sumac in it. So it was lemony. What you’re talking about is take any salad inspiration and run with it. Like we both have talked about both. And that is the idea when I’m doing these workshops is I don’t think people should follow my recipes exactly. I think it’s just a launching point for your own salad making because salad is a creative expression. It’s one of my favorite creative expressions. And it’s good to be reminded of the zitar dressing. It’s also a good reminder that purple nappa cabbage and nappa cabbage in general is in season. I love the purple, too. I have a Asian take on it that I’ve shared before on my Substack, so I can link that as well. It’s fun that salads are coming up even this time of year. It’s not necessarily the time of year where salads are at the forefront, but they’re so welcome. Well, Sonia, this is making me hungry to make another great salad and to go back to your really great salads, including that kleslaw. I really love it. Oh, well, until next time. Until next time. Bye. Thanks for being our food friend. If you enjoyed our podcast, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share this episode with friends. We love hearing from you, so follow us on Instagram or drop us a line at foodfriendodcast.com. Yes, we’d love to hear from you and your food friends. Happy cooking and eating.
Dining and Cooking