May 27 Salad

I do a little bit of edible gardening, and one item that always makes the cut each spring is tomatoes. Nothing compares to home-grown, sun-ripened tomatoes. Mother Nature’s taking her sweet time heating things up around here, and it’ll be a while before my plants start yielding anything. So for now I’ll have to stick with store-bought tomatoes. They still taste good in one of my favorite summery snacks, this quick salad of tomatoes, blue cheese and balsamic vinegar.

May 13 Salad

This Friday special incorporates the tail end of some of the delicious salads I’ve had the past couple days — arugula, grilled chicken, hard boiled egg, grape tomatoes, English cucumber and blue cheese crumbles, tossed with the end of my first batch of homemade balsamic vinaigrette.

May 9 Salad

I fondly recall picking strawberries in my Nana Dollie’s backyard. We’d bring the berries into the house and after we washed them and she’d let us dip our harvest in powdered sugar. It was absolute heaven.

I’ve always been a fan of strawberries, and they’re showing up quite a bit in the produce department these days. So why not put them in a salad? This salad of baby spinach, sliced strawberries, goat cheese crumbles and grilled chicken with a touch of balsamic vinaigrette hit the spot. The most time-consuming element of this particular salad was allowing time for the chicken to marinade in a quick mix of olive oil and balsamic vinegar before going on the grill.

May 5 Salads: Double trouble

I doubled down on salads today. I assembled a delicious hodgepodge for lunch in order to knock out some remnants from the past few days (baby greens, taco meat, cilantro dressing, beans, red bell pepper).

For dinner, I crafted a sort of Cobb with butter lettuce, hard-boiled egg, crispy turkey bacon, blue cheese crumbles, grape tomatoes and diced cucumber. I also whipped up a batch of balsamic dressing, enough for this and a few more salads. The wonderfully fresh lemon — a home-grown doozy from our neighbor’s gentleman caller — yielded enough juice to easily quadruple this dressing recipe. I reserved the remaining lemon juice for an upcoming salad.

All you need to make some delicious balsamic dressing

Balsamic dressing
(thanks to the Bon Appetit Cookbook for inspiration)
 3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
¼ cup olive oil

Whisk first three ingredients in a bowl to blend. Gradually whisk in oil.

Jolly good, indeed

Balsamic, butter give tilapia a boost

I don’t cook a ton of fish (perhaps it’s just because I prefer it raw, dunked in soy sauce?) but I try to keep an eye out for recipes that give me some underwater inspiration.

This balsamic butter sauce seemed like a good way to jazz up the blank, plain canvas that is tilapia, a fish I’ve cooked a couple times with mixed results. I found this sauce to be quite tasty, if not a little too heavy on the butter.

Next time around I’ll probably go for more balsamic and garlic, less butter. Perhaps ½ cup balsamic and two cloves of garlic mixed with ¼ cup (half stick) of butter would do the trick.

I rounded out the meal with a rice-of-many-colors mixture I found in the bulk bins of my favorite grocery store, and some mixed greens cooked and seasoned with a little bit of soy sauce, dried minced onion and red pepper flakes.

Tilapia with Balsamic Butter Sauce
(from epicurious.com)
¼ cup balsamic vinegar
1 garlic clove, minced
½ cup chilled butter, cut into half-inch cubes
6 4- to 5-ounce tilapia fillets
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper

Simmer vinegar and garlic in small saucepan over medium heat until reduced to thick syrup, about five minutes. Reduce heat to low and whisk in butter, one cube at a time.
In a large frying pan, heat 1 tablespoon olive oil over high heat. Season three fillets with salt and pepper and cook until golden, about two minutes per side. Repeat process for the remaining fillets.
Drizzle fillets with sauce before serving.