Results tagged “salad”

            

A really excellent Caesar salad is a dish that separates the decent home cook from the great one. We've all had the bad Caesar - pre-cut lettuce from a bag, brown at the edges, drowning in a sauce with too much mayo and not enough flavor. Never again! If you can take just a few ingredients and treat them very nicely, you can make a starter that will have your friends and family glowing with happiness. Or, you can scarf it all down yourself. The instructions are in the photo captions, but a quick opening note: This salad can be customized any way you like. In the style of an authentic Caesar, we used an egg (boiled for 1 minute), rather than mayo. We did not add anchovies, as the original recipe uses Worchestershire sauce, which has anchovy paste. If you want to bulk the salad up, feel free to add some homemade croutons. Most of all, keep tossing - a great Caesar must be well blended.

As much as we love eating beets, apparently we love buying beets even more. There always seems to be some lying at the bottom of our refrigerator’s crisper drawer. Since we’re averse to wasting good produce, we had to come up with something new to do with them.

With the warmer weather upon us, we've been outside exercising more and not really into the heavier meals we enjoyed during our winter hibernation. What we've been digging is a well-made salad for a meal, but salads can get really repetitive and boring if you're not careful.

We love doing something unexpected to a standard dish to make it rise above the norm and salads are no exception. We recently served a simple spring salad with sliced dates, a yellow heirloom tomato and goat cheese. The dressing was no more than a pear infused white balsamic (available at Whole Foods for about $3.50), salt, pepper, and a good olive oil. What elevated the salad was the final topping: candied walnuts.

Where protein is concerned, chicken is easily the biggest mainstay in our diet. It's affordable, lean, and easy to prepare; it provides us with the flexibility for a wide array of recipes; and we're never bored with eating it. On the other side of the spectrum is mayonnaise. We don't mean satiny emulsions like aioli fragrant with garlic or dill, mind you. We're talking about the white man's poison, Hellman's ca-ca.