Showing posts with label salad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label salad. Show all posts

Sunday, 10 February 2013

Anti-Rabbit Salad with Honey Mustard Dressing

"Hey, are you eating again the food of the rabbit?!" "Poor rabbit, you are eating up all it's food!"
Did you hear a comment like this before, while enjoying a portion of salad?
From time to time I'm getting such comments.
What can we say about this? A lot!
My rabbit like some good fresh green salad leaves. Carrots it appreciates as well. She even gladly goes for some herbs. Well, some days I gave her some Thai basil and ... she absolutely devoured it.
Well, it's true then! Are you eating up the food of the rabbit?

Not exactly! A good salad is more than just a few green leaves of salad.



A keen observer might see a few things in that salad a rabbit for sure would not appreciate at all.



Let us though go a bit into detail with preparing our Anti-Rabbit Salad. That way, the rabbit for sure would never like it, but I hope you do.

Ingredients (amounts according to taste):
Rocket
Tomatoes, according to size halved, quartered or even further
Physalis, halved
Gorgonzola, in big chunks
Walnuts ... obviously without shell, broken into smaller pieces

Honey Mustard Dressing:
Balsamic vinegar or lemon juice
3 x as much olive oil
1 tsp mustard
1 tsp honey
Salt and pepper according to taste

Method:
Put the ingredients for the dressing into a dressing shaker (old, empty and clean jam jar) and give it a good shake to bring all the ingredients together.
Put the rocket, tomatoes, physalis and the walnuts in a bowl. Pour over the dressing and mix it through carefully.
The gorgonzola I reserve for the finish in order that it doesn't fall further into smaller pieces because I like big fat chunks of it to get the full blast of the cheese flavour.

Well, a good salad isn't just a few green leaves. You have different flavours: bitter, sweet, sour, peppery, and have different textures: soft, crunchy and so forth.
This time I thought, the physalis would look nice in  the salad and taste nice as well. I have never seen them before in salads or even thought about using them that way, but ... hey, why not! Just use your imagination ...

So, I hope you enjoyed this Anti-Rabbit Salad with Honey Mustard Dressing. 
What is your favourite combination when it comes to salads?

Thursday, 23 August 2012

More from The Two Greedy Italians: Salad, Vegs, Soup

Ah, this week I feel a bit Italian. Whatever that means!
Anyway, I'm not going to say "I should have been born Italian." as someone else used to say, but it's really nice to have a lot of Italian food. Already before I wrote you a bit of my experiences with the book Two Greedy Italians eat Italy. I'm not quite through with the book, but I am making progress. 
While browsing through the book I selected three dishes to try. The first one was Insalata della Valtellina or in other words: bresaola salad. I like bresaola. If you don't know it, it's air-dried beef. This meat is very lean and tender. The origin of bresaloa is the northern region of Italy, called Lombardy.


That is how the salad looked like. Among the bresaola there are featured some black olives, hard-boiled eggs, some bread, sliced radishes and of course a few salad leaves.
I had something similar before.
This particular one here was lovely as well. I liked the different flavours and textures - meaty, crunchy, soft and ... well, it was worth making it.
Next on the list was Bagna Cauda. It's a warm dip containing ... hm ... yes, garlic was in it, quite a lot. It was warmed cooked with milk and then followed quite some oily and fatty things: anchovies, butter, olive oil and double cream.


I had it with some sliced up vegs and bread soldiers. I wanted to try bagna cauda already way before. So now, finally I made it and ... well it didn't really work as a dip. Something must have gone wrong. It was kind of thin. The bread worked well, because it has soaking power. Everything else was just minimally coated. Nevertheless, the taste was alright, but I would have liked it a bit more ... eh ... dip-like. Maybe I add some more double cream next time, or less milk.
Finally, I made a soup again. Yes, it might not be the weather for soup. Winter might not be the time to go outside with shorts, but I did it anyway. So goes the soup. Well, I'm only lucky I didn't do it three days before, when it was really hot, so hot we really had difficulties to sleep at night. Lucy was panting half the night, or something like that. Still, we both survived and now I am even able to eat a soup.


This soup is called Eisacktaler Weinsuppe or beef and wine soup. Actually, it's the very first recipe in the book (obviously it starts with soups). The preparation is clearly the opposite from what I had to do last time I made a soup. It really takes next to no time to put it together.
You just boil white wine and beef stock for one minute. Yes, just one minute. Then you add double cream and Parmesan and heat it through ... here you go. Right, you may need a bit longer when you want to have this fried bread in it, however, still it's no big deal.
From this explanation you can gather, that much depends on the wine and the stock as to the taste, because for sure this soup has a very strong wine taste.
That's for now!
For sure I try some more nice Italian recipes of those. What is your favourite Italian dish?
Let us know?

Now I'm really finished with this post. I take some more time to fight with myself, whether I'll do a spontaneous vacation within a few days ... can't decide yet ...