Monday 11 April 2011

Spring Is In The Air

The weather has finally brightened, meaning it's not a total misery to eat salad for dinner. Here's a couple that pleased me last year:



Grilled chicken, little gem lettuce with asparagus, cannalini beans, alfalfa sprouts, pomegranate seeds and torn basil leaves. I'm pretty sure the dressing was the standard one I usually make: 3 to 1 oil and white wine vinegar, dijon and wholegrain mustards, crushed garlic, sugar, salt and pepper. It would work made with lemon juice instead though.

And this one was made for lunch the next day to use up the leftover beans. They're mixed with red and yellow tomatoes and basil with a dressing made of olive oil, red wine vinegar, chilli, garlic, anchovies and capers. I like the mixture of different sorts of tomatoes, although more for aesthetic reasons than for flavour. Sometimes I used halved cherry tomatoes and bigger ones cut into sixths or eighths. There's something pleasing about the contrast in shapes and sizes. These ones came from the stall at Borough Market which sells tomatoes from the Isle of Wight.