Recipe: a spinach salad for Sarah. 19 September 2008 11:31 am
Posted by Tracy in : eugene,events,friends,recipes,restaurants,salad,vegan,vegetarian , trackback
Another month, another round of No Croutons Required. I haven’t played along since mushroom miso soup, in April, but this time, the challenge from Holler at Tinned Tomatoes was: use fruit in a soup or salad, and it was the excuse I needed to finally get around to writing this recipe up for Sarah, like I promised to do back in May. Yes, I’m a giant slacker.
Speaking of slackery, it’s not laziness that makes me a raw salad minimalist. Instead, it’s because I like to taste food as a recipe comes together, and if I’m not cooking salad ingredients, they usually don’t go through enough of a transformation to keep me interested if I’ve already eaten a bit of everything involved. Peter doesn’t have this problem, and he likes salad much more than I do, so he makes a lot of the salads we eat. But when I’m in charge of salad, I try to keep it simple, lest lunch or dinner fall victim to my sampling habits and short attention span. An added side effect of this approach is that minimalist salads are somehow much fancier than mixed greens with the works.
To get back to the theme of this month’s event, there’s a formula for a green salad so fancy it hardly even needs a vinaigrette: one green, one fruit, one nut, one cheese. You know: frisée with pears, walnuts, and Gorgonzola, arugula with raisins, pine nuts and Parmesan. (Big shout-outs are due to Kevin Huck for telling Peter the clever short phrasing of this rule, which is much catchier than my blathering about how I don’t like salads with too much “stuff” in them.) The following salad sort of fits that profile, except it uses more fruit and no cheese. I had it at a family-style dinner at Iraila Mediterranean Rustica in Eugene, and was so entranced I actually grabbed owner Mark Zolun by the arm and begged him to tell me about the dressing, which turned out to be of the embarrassingly simple persuasion. So. Here we go.
Ingredients
- baby spinach greens, 4 to 8 ounce per person depending on whether you want to do this as an appetizer or a light meal
- blood oranges, sectioned — if you don’t know how to do this already, I highly recommend Helen Rennie’s fabulous tutorial at her superlative blog Beyond Salmon — 1 per person, 2 if they’re very small or you like a lot of fruit. Cut the sections in half and use a cutting board that catches the juice if possible.
- pitted green olives, sliced into discs/rings — 1/4 to 1/2 cup per person, depending on your taste
- olive oil (good stuff, since you’re eating it raw), at least 2 TB per serving
- lemon juice, about 1 TB per serving
- ground cumin, maybe 1/2 teaspoon per serving
- salt to taste (depends on the saltiness of your olives)
Instructions
Toss together all the ingredients in a big bowl. (To bounce back to Helen Rennie once again, here’s a link to her great Culinate column on hand-tossed salad.) Adjust the seasonings to taste, toss again, and serve immediately. If you want a little spice, try replacing each 1/2 teaspoon of cumin with 1/4 teaspoon of ras el hanout (a fabulous North African spice blend of cumin, chilis, coriander, and caraway).
And there you go. I said it was simple, and I meant it. Maybe I’ll make it for/with Sarah if she comes to visit next week, and then I’ll be able to update this post with a picture, too.
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http://tinnedtomatoes.blogspot.com holler
