Normally Unremarkable but Worth the Remarks
The pre-dinner salad is such a ubiquitous thing. We hardly ever notice it, except when the dressing is clearly straight out of a bottle, or drowns the greens. But this salad caught my attention, in a good way, last night when I was taken out to dinner by a friend for my birthday. Yes, the rest of the dinner was great too. But since pre-dinner salads aren’t normally remarkable, I decided this one was worth the remarks.
The first thing I noticed were the color accents provided by the carrots and tomatoes. It’s not that other salads don’t have those ingredients, but they weren’t overdone in this case. Unfortunately my iPhone photo doesn’t quite capture the bright colors, but they were intense against the greens. The dressing was a lovely homemade, balsamic vinaigrette, simple, but done well. Finally, I don’t normally eat the onions on a salad because I don’t care for the aftertaste, but I threw caution to the wind and did this time. I was so glad because the onions were sweet, fresh, and didn’t leave an aftertaste.
Have you eaten anything recently, that is normally unremarkable but worth the remarks?
Pasta Salad With Prosciutto!
Regular readers may recall a post back in May where I bemoaned the loss of prosciutto for my dinner salad. The guilty party, Joe, was ultimately discovered and properly scolded for this transgression. Well this week it’s dinner salad week for our little cooking school, and Annie selected this recipe for her dinner last night.
To make sure the prosciutto didn’t vanish again, I followed one of the suggestions given by readers of the last post and hid the prosciutto from all possible thieves. Yup, it isn’t likely anyone would be hunting down a snack in the veggie drawer, is it? And if they found it, one would hope they’d realize that (cue up the Sesame Street tune) “one of these things is not like the others” and understand it should be respected and left where it was discovered.
I’m happy to report the prosciutto made it into the salad, and Annie did a great job putting the whole thing together for us. She is very meticulous in her measurements and careful in her chopping, so it probably took a lot longer than it takes me to fling the ingredients into the bowl and mix it up. She was a bit perturbed when I told her to use all of the spinach in the tub instead of just measuring out the two cups in the recipe. But I insisted that no harm would come to our dinner if there were an abundance of spinach in the salad. And I was right, of course.
She did a great job, and we ate a healthy, tasty, spinach filled meal. I can feel my muscles growing as I type this. Louisa has another salad planned for tomorrow’s dinner, but now that we have this theme challenge every week, they’ve already asked what should be next week’s theme. Let’s see, we’ve had dessert week, soup week, dinner salad week… what to do, what to do?
Any suggestions, readers?
Quote of the Week – July 27, 2011 – Pie Crust
“But even with the clearest directions, making pie crust is a craft, and one must develop a feel for the dough. The more you make dough, the better you get.”
Rose Levy Beranbaum, “The Pie and Pastry Bible”