Grilled Celery, hardboiled egg, chives and capers

Karl Haendel’s Grilled Celery Salad

NOTES

A super simple dish to eat all year round. Best done on the grill but you could certainly use a grill pan. If you want a more complex dressing, add finely minced anchovies to the lemon vinaigrette.

The salad is based on an Italian dish: cardoons with an anchovy vinaigrette, topped with chopped hard boiled eggs.  If you can find cardoons, give that a try!

INSTRUCTIONS

Remove bottom inch of each celery spear. Remove tops but reserve the leaves for later.

Drizzle celery generously with extra virgin olive oil, season with salt and cracked pepper.

Bring a pot of water to boil. Drop eggs into water and cook for 7-8 minutes. Remove from water, run under cold water and peel shells. Chop into 1/2″ pieces. Set aside.

Roughly chop celery leaves and chives and set aside.

Heat up your grill for 10 minutes. Place celery spears on the grill and allow to cook on each side until you see brown grill marks. Flip once. Remove from grill and cut diagonally into 1″ thick pieces.

Place on a dish, top with celery leaves, capers, egg and chives.

In a small dish, whisk together juice of 1/2 lemon with olive oil until you reach a viscous texture. Drizzle over salad, season with sea salt and pepper to taste and serve.

RECIPE

DIFFICULTY

EASY

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SERVES

2

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PREP TIME

10 MINS

Salad

  •  
    large eggs
  • bunch 
    celery
  • tbs 
    brined capers, rinsed
  • tsp 
    chives
  •  
    tbs 
    olive oil
  •  
     
    salt
  •  
     
    pepper

Dressing

  • lemon 
    juiced
  • 3-4  
    tbs 
    olive oil

INSTRUCTIONS

Remove bottom inch of each celery spear. Remove tops but reserve the leaves for later.

Drizzle celery generously with extra virgin olive oil, season with salt and cracked pepper.

Bring a pot of water to boil. Drop eggs into water and cook for 7-8 minutes. Remove from water, run under cold water and peel shells. Chop into 1/2″ pieces. Set aside.

Roughly chop celery leaves and chives and set aside.

Heat up your grill for 10 minutes. Place celery spears on the grill and allow to cook on each side until you see brown grill marks. Flip once. Remove from grill and cut diagonally into 1″ thick pieces.

Place on a dish, top with celery leaves, capers, egg and chives.

In a small dish, whisk together juice of 1/2 lemon with olive oil until you reach a viscous texture. Drizzle over salad, season with sea salt and pepper to taste and serve.

Visual Artist Karl Haendel is married to one of my dearest L.A. friends, and incredible performance artist Emily Mast. He is a lucky man, but then again, so is she. Those close to Karl and Emily, have experienced Karl’s culinary talents, but the rest of you might know him best by his public art project, Scribble, a massively enlarged doodle gesture, that was photo-realistically painted on the side of a building in Soho in 2009. Karl describes this anti-heroic work as a “gesture that anyone could make,” but I have difficulty imagining just anyone figuring out how to transfer that modest gesture onto the side of building on Broadway…

When Karl is not in his studio drawing, making video or plotting large scale public artworks, he is in his Mt. Washington Kitchen, preparing food for his wife and daughter Hazel. When Karl and I first had the opportunity for salad talk, he lit up from the inside, animatedly debating the delineating the bounds of what is a salad anyways?  This celery salad is not the first salad that Karl has shared with the world – he produced a series of drawings of his go-to salad recipes, one with fennel and black olives (one of my personal favorites), and the other a classic beet/walnut with chèvre.

Karl in His Own Words

Julia: You were once had an exhibition entitled, Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality what was that about?

Karl: Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality was a show I did in 2012.  I keep a list of odd book titles that I feel have potential resonance for me. I repurpose these for titles of shows; this was one of them.  The book “Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality” was a psychoanalytic text from the 1980s.  But 30 years later, and in relationship to my work, it becomes about class, lifestyle and choice.

Julia: How do cooking and food factor into your life? You seem to take it pretty seriously.

Karl: Cooking is a big part of my life for sure, because I love to eat!  (Now that I stopped drinking and smoking I’m down to two hedonistic pleasures). I do nearly all of the food shopping and cooking for our house; it’s crucial for my mental health.  I make art, I cook/eat, I exercise, and I read. I’m obsessive I guess, and I hate to waste a meal.

Julia: You have made salad recipes into large drawings, and presented them as art. Why and how does food, salad in particular, emerge in your practice?

Karl: Food has appeared in my work, simply because food is part of life, just like sex, love, politics and family. I did make a series of drawings called Salad Days, these could be followed just like recipes.  I like when one thing becomes another–a person is a shape, an object is a feeling–various conflations and confusions between the literal and the figurative.   Recently I wondered if I could make an interesting drawing about a sandwich, specifically because I realized putting together a sandwich is a lot like putting together one of my installations.

Julia: You and Emily eat salad every night before bed, The same salad, one that is surprisingly plebeian given the level of sophistication of the salad you prepared for the blog. What is the origin of the bedtime salad?

Karl: Some people eat ice cream or pretzels before bed, Emily and I eat salad.  Even as a kid, I would make a salad for my late-night snack.  It was always been a simple American salad – romaine, carrots, celery, a bit of red cabbage, perhaps.  I’d dress it with a package of “Good Seasons” dressing mix (our house dressing growing up).  It became a tradition, and I continue to eat this same salad every night.  I suppose I find it comforting, but that “Good Seasons” dressing is really good stuff.  Very underrated.

Julia: Before we made your salad, we debated the nature of salad itself. How to define something with such blurry edges. What did you resolve that a salad is for you? Or does it even matter?

Karl: I like to think through something before I make a choice.  When buying a car you should understand the essence of car-ness before sealing the deal. When I realized that this dish should be served warm and required a knife to eat it, I wondered, is it a salad after all?   Through our discussion, I think we established that the essence of saladness is based on: size (it should arrive bite sized), even distribution of elements (you should be able to consume most or all elements in a single bite), and dressing (including both acid and a fat).  Although your blue cheese iceburg wedge needs a knife, as does your caprese, so there are always exceptions!