Another Tasty Dinner Salad

I am just never going to be one of those professional food bloggers because most of the time when we sit down to eat something I’ve made, no matter how good it is or how nice it looks, I am not interested in getting up and grabbing the camera and getting a nice shot.

Add to that my presentation possibilities, which are somewhat limited. True, we usually eat off these lovely Depression glass plates in a pattern called “Charm,” but the little farmhouse table we eat at is stained and bleached from years of bread-kneading and other food projects.

So–no image of the wonderful salad we had tonight, but I’ll write about it because it was really good. I don’t know about you, but along about this time of year I get a serious hankering for fresh greens. I don’t have anything of edible size or in edible shape in the gardens right now, so I went for the boxed organic arugula they’ve been stocking at Jones’.

Threw that arugula in the salad spinner and gave it a cold water bath. Cracked a can of organic great northern beans, rinsed, and drained them, then combined them with a tin of Bela lemon-olive oil sardines (broken up a bit). Dressed the beans with a little oregano, half a lemon’s worth of juice, a little olive oil, a crushed garlic clove, pepper. A squirt of Woeber’s sweet and spicy mustard.

Shaved thin slices off a red onion, and chopped a Gala apple into little bite-sized chunks. Served up each thing (leaves, bean/sardine mix, apples, onions) each in their own dish, so we could each fix our salad to our own proportional likings. Put a wedge of Parmesan on the table for grating, plus a little white balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and peppermill for further dressing.

A side note to anyone who thinks my dog is some sort of Lab mix–even without the webbed feet and oily coat–the thing that really makes it clear she’s no kind of water animal is that she won’t touch any kind of fish whatsoever. She thinks it’s disgusting, and has been known to get mad and toss salmon skins across the room if I put them on top of her food dish. She won’t touch the food left in the bowl, either–presumably because it also stinks of fish.

That doesn’t keep her from eyeing us while we’re eating a fishy dinner though–but her eyes are following the mistress’ homemade bread, and not our forks. What tells you her real Border Collie heritage is her absolute love of anything lamb or sheep-smelling (or tasting).

One spring we had a lamb roast on the island. She seemed to have disappeared–funny considering they were removing hot chunks of meat from the roasting pit–but we ultimately found her lurking under the table where they were carving the lamb–the warm fat running all over her head and shoulders while she ate the drippings-soaked sand below.