More Cheese More Chocolate » Salad

Chopped Cobb Salad

Kirsten — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:53:40 +0000

Salads are generally pretty boring posts, but when the list of ingredients include beets, avocado, bacon and blue cheese I figure they’re worth sharing. Pretty much anything involving bacon and blue cheese is worth sharing, come to think of it. This salad has a lot of the components of a traditional cobb salad (tomatoes, avocado, bacon, hard-boiled eggs, blue cheese) with a few extras thrown in to make it even better (beets! cucumber!). Everything gets chopped up, tossed together, and drizzled with vinaigrette – pretty simple. Minus the bacon and blue cheese, it’s a pretty healthy dinner. And thanks to the bacon and blue cheese, you’ll want to eat your vegetables.

Chopped Salad

Several handfuls of any combination of greens

3 stalks celery

1 cucumber, peeled, and seeded

Handful or two of grape tomatoes

Several springs of fresh herbs

2-3 small to medium beets, roasted

4-5 strips of bacon, crisped

3 hard-boiled eggs

About 1/4 cup crumbled blue cheese

1 avocado

For the dressing:

1 part Dijon mustard

1 part white wine vinegar

3 parts olive oil

Salt & pepper

Wash and chop the greens, then add them to a big bowl. I used several handfuls of baby spinach, about 1/3 of a head of red leaf lettuce and about 1/3 of a head of romaine.

Chop some tomatoes, celery, and herbs. Add them to the greens. I used several sprigs of both parsley and chives.

Chop cucumbers, beets, eggs, and bacon. Add them to the bowl as well as some crumbled blue cheese.

Toss everything together. Drizzle with vinaigrette and serve. If you think you’ll have leftovers, add the dressing to individual plates instead of to the big bowl. Same goes for the avocado, as brown bits of avocado make the leftovers much less appealing.

Goes well with a toasted slice of quinoa, flax, and poppy seed bread!

Filed under: Cheese, Salad

Blackened Salmon Salad, Two Ways

Kirsten — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 02:31:00 +0000

It’s be a rough few weeks here in More Cheese More Chocolate land. Matt and I suffered a huge loss a little over a week ago, and cooking, let alone blogging, haven’t been much of a priority. (Thanks to my big brother for filling in a little while I’ve been gone!) We spent many, many days surrounded by family and friends and ungodly amounts of comfort food, with nary a vegetable in sight. While the outpouring of support in the form of home-cooked meals was completely overwhelming, there comes a time when you’re ready to stop eating platefuls of meat and bread and you no longer want to be surrounded by a dozen varieties of cookies, brownies, and cakes.

When I returned to Minneapolis a few days ago I was excited to get back into the kitchen, and a big salad was at the top of my list of things to make. I had originally planned on making a niçoise salad, but when I realized that my co-op didn’t have tuna steaks my plans changed a bit. My focus shifted from my list of ingredients for niçoise salad to random things that sounded good and seemed to fit together. The next thing I knew I was making blackened salmon, crumbling blue cheese, and slicing new potatoes. This salad base would work well with steak or chicken in place of the salmon, and the vinaigrette could easily be swapped out for blue cheese dressing.

The base of this salad consisted of green leaf lettuce, spinach, boiled new potatoes, roasted red peppers, cucumber, green pepper, and blue cheese. For a dressing I drizzled it with olive oil, red wine vinegar, and a little lemon juice.

Blackened Salmon

Adapted from Real Simple

Preheat the oven to 400.For the salmon spices I combined 2 teasp

oons paprika, 2 teaspoons cayenne, 1/2 teaspoon thyme, 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt in a shallow bowl. The cayenne came flying out of the bottle when I was measuring it, so I probably had a little more than 2 teaspoons and it was very hot. If you’re not that into spicy foods you can reduce the cayenne by half or more. This spice mixture will coat 3-4 servings of salmon.

Melt a couple tablespoons of butter in a small saucepan, remove it from the heat, and stir in the juice of 1/2 to 1 whole lemon. Transfer the mixture to a shallow bowl.

When the oven is nearing 400, heat an ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. Dip the salmon in the lemon butter and then in the spice mixture to coat. Cook the salmon on the stove for about 2 minutes per side, and then transfer the skillet to the oven for about 8 minutes to finish the cooking. Place the salmon atop the salad and eat, eat, eat.

The second salad had more of a Mediterranean twist with green leaf lettuce, tomato, cucumber, olives, sliced pepperoncini, and a lot of crumbled feta. The dressing was a vinaigrette made up of one part dijon mustard, one part red wine vinegar, and three parts olive oil.

Leftover salmon topped off the salad, and it was delicious.

Filed under: Salad, Seafood

Mustardy Potato Salad

Kirsten — Sun, 24 May 2009 16:50:00 +0000

MCMC is back! Sorry for the lengthy absence. I finally got back from vacation, seeing an adorable baby, and cruising around on a tractor, only to deal with a malfunctioning wireless router. The internet issues have been resolved, and the blogging should now be back to normal.

Potato salad seems to be the popular thing to make on summer holiday weekends, so I’ll kick things back into gear with a mustardy potato salad with chives. This is a really flexible recipe, and takes well to substitutions, additions, and deletions.

Start out with 12-15 small potatoes. My mom and I couldn’t decide between new potatoes and little Yukons, so we got both and used half of each. Cut the potatoes in half, add to a pot, cover with cold water, and bring to a boil.

While the potatoes boil chop one bunch of green onions, a couple of celery stalks, and a bunch of fresh chives.

Boil the potatoes until fork tender, then let them cool a bit so you can handle them. Slice them into slightly smaller pieces and transfer them to a large bowl.

Add the green onions, celery, and chives to the potatoes along with some salt and pepper.

For the dressing we used sour cream, yellow mustard, mayo, and malt vinegar. Although I made the mixture in a measuring cup, I didn’t pay much attention to the actual amounts I was adding. If I had to guess, I used about 1/3 cup sour cream, 1/4 cup mustard, a couple spoonfuls of mayo, and maybe 2 tbsp vinegar. You could start out with those amounts and then add a little of each until it tastes good to you. We had about 1 cup of dressing, and it was the perfect amount. I hate potato salad that is just potatoes drenched in mayo, and we successfully created an alternative.

Here it is all mixed together. Add salt & pepper to taste at the end. We planned to add a few hard boiled eggs, but we had a few issues with them. Chopped up dill pickles or capers would also be a nice addition.

We rounded out the meal with grilled asparagus, grilled stuffed jalepenos, and grilled chicken breasts. More recipes coming soon!

Posted in Salad, Sides