salad days

Just a quick one this week because I have work cramming in so I can move on to my favorite long weekend of the year! I wanted to introduce you to a new favorite salad dressing of mine.



I had some friends over for dinner last week and “something healthy” was requested. Which I'm always happy to oblige with. Not to mention it's getting hot out there, which means big salads are on the agenda almost all the time at my house. For this particular salad I combined Boston lettuce, black beans (cooked, drained), slices of avocado, a bit of diced red onion, some scallions and some fresh corn, cooked and hacked off the cob and I served it with some jalapeno corn muffins. Obviously some heavy Tex-Mex-ish business was going on, so I came up with this riff on vinaigrette that came out great. It would also make a top notch marinade for chicken, shrimp, steak or veggies (especially shrimp I think). In fact, later on that week, I added a little more citrus and olive oil and used it as a vegetable marinade for a big bunch of kabobs I grilled.




SPICY SCALLION LIME VINAIGRETTE

two scallions, chopped
one small clove garlic, minced
juice from one lime
1/2 tsp(ish) of honey
pinch of cumin
pinch of cayenne
couple shakes of hot sauce (I used Franks)
salt and peppa
olive oil (about a scant ¼ cup)



Combine all ingredients in a wide mouthed jar and whiz with an immersion blender until creamy. If you don’t have an immersion blender, you could make this in a regular blender, a food processor or even just chop the scallion and garlic very fine and do a shaken vinaigrette.



Try this on mixed greens, or a black bean confetti salad. It’s really delicious. There’s a little bit of bite from the spices and hot sauce and a nice well rounded flavor from the lime juice. Oh and as for the "homemade" corn muffins, I naturally turned to childhood nostalgia in the form of Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix, to which I added chopped jalapenos. Total Sandra Lee style but whatever, homemade corn muffins required corn meal that cost like $4.00 and for me to pay attention to what I was doing and a box of Jiffy was seriously I think 39 cents and required zero brain power whatsoever.



Enjoy your holiday weekend! I will be making lots of goodies to bring to our respective cookouts and then leaving the rest of my weekend wide open for a few of my favorite activities: eatin’, beachin’, yakkin’, cacklin’ and day drinkin’. Because nothing says “I love my country” like a 3 p.m. blackout.