Tags
Around My French Table, BLT salad, deconstructed BLT, Dorie Greenspan, Everyday vinaigrette, French Fridays with Dorie, potao & leek soup
This is a pretty special French Fridays with Dorie for me because this is the first friday since I joined the group that my husband has been home to enjoy it with me! He has been gone a long, long time for work and kept up on my FFwD posts, here on my blog, but now he can enjoy making them and eating them with me! The last time he got to hold Mei, she was two months old and no more than 8 pounds and now she is weighing in at a whoppin’ 18 pounds and 8 months! We were both happy to see him and Patella was sure glad to have her daddy back as well!
It’s simply wonderful to have him home at long last and it also means a recipe that is meant for 4 or 6 people/servings wont keep me eating massive amounts of whatever we make for the next couple days, for each meal!
That being said, since today’s assignment was a salad – a deconstructed B.L.T. so we chose to get caught up on a recipe we missed last fall and make some leek and potato soup to go with it! Which made for a great, light and filling dinner of which we each had two servings!
My hubby and Mei hung out in the living room playing with her toys, along with Patella, throwing her toys around for her while I assembled dinner. The kitchen was a little empty without my sous chef, but I was glad to have use of the entire counter, as someone’s tiny hands and arms are fairly far-reaching these days.
Since I happened to have two carrots and four ribs of celery lying around and needing a use, I put them into the base of the soup which gave the soup a much heartier feel I think that I wouldn’t do without next time. In fact I might add a cheese rind, since I always seem to have one or two lying around in the fridge to elevate the soup a bit more. I also ran my immersion blender through it and I think next time, I will reserve some bits of potato to give it a bit more texture or strain it to make it completely silky, smooth but that would simply be for aesthetics. But we wound up garnishing it with some bacon bits that I made for the salad and it was sure tasty! I might even make some of Emeril’s breakfast potato “boxes” to garnish the soup next time we make it and try a few different toppings like creme fraiche (which you all know is my new favorite thing!).
The salad comes together so lightning fast!
Especially since I didn’t have any bread to make croutons with and decided not to put in the croutons I had on hand, but instead substituted in bits of avocado that had ripened and needed a use also. It was a great decision! In the end, I’m not sure that either of us really got the “feel” of a B.L.T. in the salad, but the vinaigrette was to die for and we both loved the eggs in it, so this will be a great salad for a lazy day since it is such a quick meal to assemble and mostly we always have the ingredients on hand!
Oh, I should mention that I don’t like arugula. The British call it “rocket” and no matter if it is British rocket or American arugula, I don’t care for the sharp, peppery taste of it. It is just hard on my palate, which was probably heightened by my pregnancy, but it is just so ubiquitous on everything here – including pizza!
There is no escape from arugula/rocket! ….
So I chopped up romaine hearts instead. Those went over nicely with
everything else and made this salad feel like a cross between a B.L.T. – Caesar salad – Cobb salad combo, which was fitting with our delicious leek and potato soup. I even made plenty of extra bacon bits (a good call, in the end), boiled a few extra eggs (another good call), and made double the vinaigrette (I could easily be persuaded to make quadruple the amount of that!)!!
I can’t wait to make this for another “rainy day” style lunch with some sandwiches… it would be a perfect trio!
To see what the other Doristas thought and served with this salad or if you would like to join our group, French Fridays with Dorie, click here. We are cooking, eating & blogging our way through Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan which has just been a page-turning, delicious time!