Lima Bean and Grape Tomato Salad

I originally bought this salad from the supermarket from those meal-in-a-box counters. I know. Totally out of character. Oh well.

Anyways, it's a really simple salad that I made with a lemon vinaigrette (2/3 olive oil, 1/3 freshly squeezed lemon juice, salt and pepper). The salad itself consists of a can of lima beens - mine looked a bit sick - grape or other tiny tomatoes, the tender yellow celery stalks, julienned carrots, the sprouts of your choice - alfalfa or bean sprouts or whatever - a good handful of fresh parsley chopped, roughly chopped green beans and a few green onions. Really simple. Really fresh. Really good.

Another such salad I'd eaten once - and by "such salad" I mean lettuce-less salads - was at a Native Canadian dinner. Along with bannock and roasted deer meat, there was a simple salad of wild rice, pine nuts and fresh blueberries. All very Northern Ontario. I don't even think they had a vinaigrette to go along with it but it was really delicious and fresh. Very local. And local isn't always possible in the great white north.

Roasted Sweet & Spicy Lamb on Braised Lentils with Orange & Carrot Salad

I seem to have hit the mark with this one. As many things in the kitchen do nowadays, it all started at the farmer's market when I found these beautiful little lamb loin chops. It's amazing how buying lamb or duck or other such delicacies is ridiculously overpriced at the supermarket and thus relatively cheap when bought directly from the farmer. But that's another story.

I marinated my loin chops in a sweet and spicy sauce. The hope was to recreate something I'd eaten at Three Guys and A Stove in Huntsville, Ontario. Here is the description of the astounding lamb ribs I had there: "Ontario lamb charred with sweet & spicy roasted peanut glaze, grilled marinated pineapple and Frangelico & served with roasted red potatoes and vegetables". If you're mouth is watering at the description, you should definitely try it out for yourself. When those posh feather headed ladys in big city cooking shows say that something is "divine", they've never tasted these ribs. Now my loin chops weren't necessarily divine but considering that I'm no celibrity chef, I have to admit that this dish was well put together as far as flavours and textures go.

The lamb turned out very nice and the sauce had caramelized beautifully over top of it. I sat them on a bed of braised red lentils, the recipe having been found on Epicurious.com (I've included the link below). The sweet and mildly spicy taste of the lamb combined perfectly with the rich and very home-cooked tasting lentils. To add and repeat flavours, I made an orange and carrot North African salad that both highlighted ingredients in the lamb sauce and added some extra zing and crunchy texture. The finishing touch was a light dusting of cinnamon. All in all, this was the kind of meal that I would work on to make it really out of this world.

Sweet & Spicy Sauce

2 tbsp marmalade or apricot jam
1 tbsp peanut butter
1 garlic clove, mashed
1/2 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
ground or fresh hot pepper to desired spiciness
1/4 cup roasted peanuts (I used pecans cause that's what I had on hand. This recipe would be great with, say, roasted almonds and almond butter or any other such doubling of a nut. A combination of different nuts would propably be delicious as well.)

1. Combine all ingredient to make a paste and slather over meat to marinate for an hour or more. Place the marinated meat of choice on a roasting pan, making sure that sauce is on top. Cook till meat is done and sauce has caramelized.

Braised Lentils : http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/105559

Orange Salad with Carrot : North African Cooking by Tess Mallos, p. 48

Simple Salad with Lemon Oil and Lots of Snow

So like I said last time, there's a whole chapter in Cook with Jamie that's all about salads. I figure it's not a huge sin if I don't have all the ingredients for a salad so long as it's close. I mean a basic salad is a basic salad. I'm not talking about fancy salads with cured meats and fancy cheeses and dressings with 28 ingredients in them. But this particular salad was entitled "Simple Crunchy Salad". I was missing romaine lettuce, green beans which were supposed to be blanched and cucumber. The ingredients I did have were Boston lettuce, a carrot, celery heart, parsley and I added some grape tomatoes. This chapter also has a few recipes for dressings; because if you're going to make fresh salad, might as well make the little extra effort to make your own fresh, preservative-free dressing. And the dressing I chose couldn't be any simpler: 3 1/2 tablespoons of freshly squeezed lemon juice with 10 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil shaken together and seasoned to taste with sea salt and freshly ground pepper. Simple dressing, simple salad but really nice taste.

In the background you might recognise a generous slice of tourtière which also goes by the name of meat pie. Where I'm from a tourtière is made with ground beef but this one was made with ground pork. It was storebought so it wasn't the best I've ever eaten. I'm used to 3/4 meat and a thinner crust. All that was needed was a bit more ketchup yet it was still easily outshined by the simple salad. Some things are just better when your grandma makes it.

Oh and here's a photo of my front yard today. The office was closed so I'm snowed in :) Who says winter isn't a beautiful season?

Very, Very Basic Salad

Something else I picked up at the farmer's market over the weekend was frisé lettuce. I don't know the English term for it but it's the kind of lettuce that curly and a bit bitter. Once again considering the freshness of ingredients at the present time, I didn't want to mess around with the crisp, beautiful lettuce. The result was the making of the simplest salad I know. A recipe from our grandmothers in Kap.

All you need is a fresh head of curly lettuce, 6 or so green onions, cream or sour cream, salt and pepper. I added colour with some locally grown yellow zuchinni but this is usually left out which results in a very minimalistic salad that highlights the unsung beauty of lettuce.

If it's fresh, don't mess with it. Leave that job to crappy restaurants.

The Ultimate Salad

I don't know if I mentioned this before but the house I grew up in was not culinarily inclined in the least. The worst meal my father used to make was those little sausages with canned cream corn and dry mashed potatoes. This meal came from a line of economy cooking along with other such delicacies as hamburger patties in mushroom soup.

When I was in highschool my parents didn't mind a bit if I cooked. I liked cooking. I liked how it was calming, methodical, and how you needed to be organized to get it all together. It's in those days that I discovered that grilling sweet corn without he husk and spreading barbecue sauce between every kernel was simply a great idea.

Seeing as corn is coming into season, I grilled some corn in this fashion for my girlfriend. At first she thought it would just be like all my other quirky food preparations and prefered to stick to her boiled corn with butter, salt and pepper. But after she took one bight of my corn, which I'd slathered with Jamaican jerk bbq sauce, she was cooked.

The next day, I figured I'd use the rest of the corn to make a salad. The result was one of the best salads I've ever eaten although with the amount of ingredients in it, I'm not sure it still qualifies as a salad. We piled the leftover corn kernels all sticky with barbecue sauce along with chunks of cheddar, mangos, apple slices, tomatoes, cucumber, barbecued chicken, grilled red and green onions, grilled mushrooms, and California trail mix over romain lettuce and drizzled the whole with a honey balsamic vinaigrette. The result was really delicious and filling.

Like soups, stews and sandwiches, I find salads have a great potential for variety. You have the form and the basic elements and then you could just keep adding till you satisfied. For salads you know you have a vinaigrette with some vegetables. For a soup you know you have stock with whatever else you want. For sandwiches you have bread, a sauce and some fillings. The options are unlimited and the form is so easy to work with.

Anyways, that's that. Grill your corn with barbecue sauce.