spotlight on salads

by michelletranny

I’m not going to purport any sort of salad mastery on my part, as that tends to be Caroline’s area of expertise.  In fact, most of the salads I’ve made for others have consisted of ingredient combinations and/or dressing recipes borrowed from Caro or Jane.  Looking through my photo archives, I found some snaps of two particularly notable salads I’ve served to others that I shall now share here.  The first is an Italian antipasto-type salad first thought up by Jane that I recreated for Thanksgiving dinner with my parents.  To preface this, it’s worth noting that I was brought up with fairly unconventional Thanksgiving traditions: every year since I was 6 my dad and I have made lasagna (almost entirely from scratch — we use store-bought noodles) for Thanksgiving dinner, served alongside my mom’s homemade garlic bread.  This past year I made a salad to go with it, trying to keep with our off-beat Italian theme.  The salad consisted of spring mix, thinly-sliced red onion, halved red grapes and cherry tomatoes, thinly sliced salami, shaved gruyere, and chopped toasted walnuts.  I tossed it all up with a simple vinaigrette made of red wine vinegar, olive oil, dijon, and s&p.  The sweetness of the grapes contrasted with the spiciness of the red onion really made this salad something special.

This may sound silly, but I’m really a fan of ingredient still-life photos — not only are they pleasant to look at (in my opinion), but they are extremely useful when trying to remember what goes into a recipe!

So I guess in retrospect the gruyere was grated rather than shaved — but if I could go back, I would’ve shaved it!

Thanksgiving dinner, 2009:

The second salad I want to mention is another one I made for my parents.  On Christmas eve this past year, my neighbors who we’ve been close with since we bought a house in Huntington Beach (and who also definitely had a hand in my upbringing) came over for dinner, and I fashioned and executed a four course menu that everyone was extremely impressed with.  Maybe I’ll post about this some other time.  I kicked off the meal with a poached pear salad with blue cheese and champagne vinaigrette recipe that caught my eye in the December 2009 issue of Bon Appetit.  Here’s a link to the recipe.  For the champagne vinaigrette, I used about half the amount of olive oil the recipe calls for and was very pleased with the end result.  All in all, the recipe was a bit more involved than I tend to like to get when making salads — I had to poach the pears in advance which took a little while.  It was definitely worth it though — I warmed up the leftover pear poaching liquid and served it with dessert as mulled wine.  Delicious!

Here’s what the salad looked like:

The elegance of the final presentation definitely made me feel like a pro.  Bon Appetit, you haven’t failed me yet!  Please don’t die like Gourmet D: