Cobb Salad

Tags

avocado, bacon, baked chicken, blue cheese, cherry tomato, cobb salad, cucumber, Dorie Greenspan, Everyday vinaigrette, hard boiled egg, pan fried chicken, salad cream, vinaigrette

I do miss having really nice, crisp, fresh salads to order in restaurants.

Here in England, salads are usually a small, dinky thing with one or two tomato slices flanked by a couple thin cucumber rings and just a slice of red onion on a small bed of greens (usually arugula) topped with …. nothing. I get that vinegar and oil are popular toppings, as is salad cream – which is something akin to mayo that you are to smear on your greens (I have yet to be impressed by that one) but getting actual dressings in the way we are accustomed to in the States is a rare occasion. In fact, I am aware of all the restaurants that actually offer some kind of dressing that is neither oil & vinegar or salad cream, for their house or side salads within two hours of my house.

That’s a lot of restaurants – including pubs!!

Of course, this list excludes any “artisan salads” like Caesar or some other salad that dictates it’s own unique dressing.

That being said, sometimes you just crave a really nice salad! It had been a really long time since I have had a cobb salad and I spotted one while skimming through a recent issue of Food & Wine magazine and decided that would be a perfect dinner! Especially since we were having a fairly hot spell! We had the windows open all day and night, had fans going in all the rooms we were occupying as we moved around the house, and tried to use hot water, the stove and the oven as little as possible. Even Patella couldn’t stand to be in the house, but would lounge around the yard, sticking to the cool, shady patches of grass as the sun moved throughout the day. Mei even had a couple of those “naked” days where she would have either just a diaper on, or just a diaper and a really thin tank top.

And we were going all out with this salad. I wanted it HUGE and decked out with all the toppings! We dressed it with Dorie Greenspan’s Everyday Vinaigrette (3 TBS olive oil, 1 TBS  dijon mustard, 1 TBS red wine vinegar, salt and pepper to taste, shaken until emulsified and chilled for use) and enjoyed picking out all of our toppings. It made for a filling and cool meal on an otherwise sweltering summer day with no A/C – in fact, shopping for the toppings was a really cool experience, since the produce section of the grocery store stays pretty chilly! We lingered there and hurried home for a great salad! This made plenty enough that we had leftovers for lunch the next day – alongside some tall glasses of sun tea? The perfect end to a perfect summer day!

Ingredients:

• cherry tomatoes, halved
• cucumbers, sliced and quartered
• bacon, cooked until crispy and crumbled
• 2 hard boiled eggs, peeled and sliced
• 1 avocado, ripened and cubed
• blue cheese, crumbled
• 2 chicken breasts, cooked & cubed
• 1 head of romaine lettuce, roughly chopped
• 1 head of butter lettuce, roughly chopped
• vinaigrette (recipe above) or other dressing
• salt & pepper to taste

First, cook your bacon to your liking – we like ours extra crispy for these occasions.

Second, cook your chicken to your liking. We alternate between pan frying the chicken breasts with fresh lemon squeezed over top and a touch of white wine to baking the chicken breasts for about twenty minutes at 350F, rubbed all over with any blend of spices or simply salt and pepper, to your liking. Slice and cube your chicken as you prefer.

Prepare all your veggies as indicated.

Toss the two greens together until evenly mixed, then toss with the vinaigrette. Split the greens between serving bowls, then top with as much of each of the rest of the ingredients as desired.

We serve our salads with even more vinaigrette drizzled over the top, leaving a dish of the vinaigrette with a spoon on the table in case you find forkfuls that need a bit more of the dressing.

Unsettled Weather

I have been a bit remiss in my postings for the past few days, so I thought I would satiate your need to read my blog with a little update from the garden!

Things have been growing very well,… in fact with all the rain we have been experiencing in the past couple of weeks, we have not needed to physically water our garden ourselves!

The only thing we really need in our garden is SUN!!

It is a rather a-typical British summer and we are all hoping that this means a late summer with plenty of heat, right around the corner – and since it is only early July, there is hope yet!

I have been diligently going out and clipping any yellowing leaves on any number of our plants, especially the pole beans and tomatoes that have turned yellow due to the over-watering (that is a tad out of our control). Although all the rain has finally gotten our beans to grow flowers – which is pretty promising in the way of actually producing any beans to speak of, and a few green tomato buds on our tomato plants!!

It has been really interesting to see how our three different tomato plants have been responding to the sun/rain combo and how they grow differently, have different shaped leaves and patterns in the way that they expand and where they are growing their fruit. It has definantly kept us guessing!

We have also planted tiger tomato plants… only about 8, which have about 3-5 plants within the one… so we are expecting some late cropping tomatoes by the bushels! The husband unit has agreed (already) to allow me to purchase as many canning jars as will be necessary to can the crazy amount of pasta sauce, salsa and any other tomato – related items I can whip up in the kitchen later this fall! Yippee!!

beans!!

The crookneck squash is absolutely flourishing! It has gotten a tad out of control, and I am considering a few different ways to contain it’s leafiness so that we can give it maximum vertical space to grow, since the horizontal space is shared between the cucumbers and pumpkin plants … which are slow to grow but expanding in their own right as well.

I also planted two new rows of late crop carrots, and they have been budding and coming up nicely – I am absolutely excited to get them out in a few months! The other carrots, all of our purple varieties, are hitting the point where they are needing to be thinned out – so the next semi-dry day in the garden, this task will be accomplished.

purple dragon heart carrots

We have been eating a few radishes here and there that have come up, and they are pretty spicy and cute looking! The bright lights radishes are pretty neat, we have been loving the different colors and shapes that the variety have given us and I know that it will certainly be a variety of veg that we will grow each year! One thing that we have noticed is that we need to give them more room to grow and certainly need to plant them in rotation so we can have a constant crop since we are going to wind up with a bucket full of radishes all at once that are ready at once and we will need a radish-heavy recipe to contain them all! It’s a good thing my husband loves radishes!

radish bed #1

The corn however, have been LOVING the rain! So have the potatoes in the potato box – which my husband is a bit dubious that it will actually grow much in the way of potatoes by the fall… not entirely sure why… hmmm…

I am very shocked to see how well the corn is doing actually, since for no particular reason, I wasn’t actually convinced that I could grow corn on my own that actually grew to heights we expect to see in those huge corn fields with the ears of corn the size we get at the grocery store. *Fingers crossed* the corn will continue to bolt and produce enormous ears fit for grilling!

potato box!

tomatillos

brussell sprouts

The tomatillos are actually going to be a surprise… they are very slow in growing, although they do show signs of growth each week. Since we started out with a dozen plants in the same planter which has whittled it’s way down to three plants, I’m certain that if they grow enough, they will set fruit – since they require at least two plants to self-fertilize themselves. But I am a bit concerned at how slow their growth is, this might be a learning curve we experience. We might have wanted to leave them inside in containers a bit longer until they were a bit less fragile and could withstand the heavy thunderstorm rain we have been having lately.

Just before we left for Paris (post on that to come), we germinated a couple more packets of bean seeds, a pole variety and bush variety, and stuck them outside in the couple of trough containers that we had other pole beans in that didn’t survive our little heat wave… more on those little babies later! The garden has been an interesting and exciting place to spend our afternoons lately, Mei is discovering all sorts of things, helping to weed and happily chatting to all of our plants – bidding each hello and goodbye while we work around them.

Mei helping to weed our tiger tomatoes