Three Great Salads

In the couple of weeks after Valentine's Day, Melissa made good use of some leftover ingredients from our three-course love-day dinner by putting together some tasty salads. When we eat we are generally shooting for diversity, not low-fat or low-calorie per se, so you'll notice that these have some ingredients you wouldn't include in a typical starvation-diet salad. They tend to be much more enjoyable that way...

While I was away for a conference, Melissa made two salads for her own meals -- both with the aim of using up the iceberg lettuce she used in the shrimp cocktail. The first salad was stir-fried chicken thighs, sliced and marinated in a soy-sauce and sesame oil concoction with a drop of liquid smoke added for that wood-grilled flavor. Served up on a couple of handfuls of iceberg lettuce with cherry tomatoes and fresh green capsicum, salt and pepper and a dab of Kewpie Japanese mayonnaise for dressing. I wish I had been here to eat that.

A second salad saw a similar set of ingredients in a slightly different incarnation: an avocado half from that Valentine's Day shrimp cocktail replaced the capsicum, and a poached egg was added (because Melissa loves poached eggs). Again that Kewpie mayo makes the dish.

This last one I did get in on. Using the last of the great beef tenderloin in our freezer and the one remaining blood orange from the blood orange mimosas, Melissa made a salad that set my taste buds buzzing. On a bed of field greens she served up seared tenderloin slices (seasoned only with salt and pepper -- and very rare) with sections of orange. The dressing was balsamic vinegarette blended up with marinated green peppercorns and a few garlic cloves. The acids from the orange and balsamic complemented the seared beef beautifully.

All three salads would be good with a crisp, fruity sauv blanc (probably from New Zealand or Chile in our house) or a nice dry chenin blanc. I don't remember what we drank with the tenderloin salad, but it was probably one of those.

Salads make us long for summer weather -- only three months to go...