Tossing around a salad: arugula, beets, avocado and... blueberries

I think there may be only one salad "recipe" on this blog. Way back when it started, I wrote something about how the simple green salad is far from simple, and how I thought that, in many ways, it is the hardest thing for a cook to make. I stand by that: you can almost always get away with food that isn't perfect, but a salad will stand up and announce its flaws in a loud, strident voice. It is easy to do it wrong.

The Guyman and I probably eat more salad than any other dish. We have one every night at dinner. I plan them, very much around what else we're eating: a richer salad if the dinner is lighter, a plainer one if it's rich. So, if we're having a steak, I'm not going to put out a salad with chunks of blue cheese and nuts in it. That salad will be all vegetables, maybe even nothing but "greens." On the other hand, if the meal centers around pasta in a red sauce with some cheese grated on it, the salad will be more involved. My salads almost, but not always, have greens in them, and then one, maybe two, other vegetable ingredients, and then "something extra," like nuts, or cheese. One thing that they never included, was fruit.

Until recently.

Two years ago, it seemed to be the spring of strawberries and arugula in San Francisco. I love eating in San Francisco, but the truth is, after the first four meals, you know what ingredients you're going to be eating, and the question is no longer "what kind of fish will they have," but "how are they going to cook the halibut/salmon/bass." That year, EVERY SINGLE RESTAURANT served a salad that involved arugula and strawberries. I have to say, it's a good combination. And I enjoyed it the first four times. After that, the game was "what other salads do they have?" I think the combination of the sweet fruit, with the slightly bitter greens, was what I enjoyed... the first four times. I had never thought of combining fruit with a salad before, although I know there are things out there like waldorf salad, with its apples, and salads with pear and nuts and cheese in them. They just have not been in my mindframe.

Just last weekend, the Guyman and I had dinner at a restaurant we literally "discovered" one night after the ballet. It was late, we were hungry, and this place was opened. It used to be a diner, and I had a feeling that's what we were going to be eating: diner food.

Nope. The restaurant, called Eolo (the Sicilian form of "Aeolus," who is supposed to have lived on Sicily), is a truly Sicilian restaurant. We hit it off with the folks that night, and had a somewhat simple meal. We had one of our full dinners on Friday and one item on the menu was a salad based on celery, cucumbers, and strawberries.

Well, to be honest, this is "Siciliano nuovo." It is not a combination out of classical Sicilian cooking, but that's ok. I ordered it, tried it, and it was SO DAMN GOOD. And my salad based brain cells started thinking of fruit in salad.

So, last night, we were having fish for dinner, with a sauce based on nuts. My own way of cooking tells me not to repeat things like nuts in two courses, so nuts were not going in the salad. I had some baby arugula that was beginning to give me what my friend Nora calls "the stink eye," so that was going to be the basis of the salad. To my taste, arugula always goes well with beets, and we always have cooked beets in the house, usually in both yellow and red (in separate containers). Avocados were ripening on the sideboard, and there were the makings of the salad.

And then... the half container of blueberries. Not enough for lunch, but... and they were GOOD blueberries too, from Lisa, the queen of farmers market berries. I was using the golden beets, and the color combination just seemed to say: USE ME. And use them I did.

Let's just stop for a minute and review how to cook beets, because it's easy. Fill a non-iron baking dish with about a third of an inch of water. Put the beet roots, with a bit of stem on them, into the water. Tightly (and I mean TIGHTLY), cover the container with foil, and bake in a 350-400 degree oven for at least half an hour, for small beets, and much longer, for bigger ones. Test after half an hour to see if a fork pierces them. If it does, you're ready. If not, re-cover the pan, and bake longer.

Let them cool until they're easy to handle, and then run them under water, rubbing off the skin. It will come off easily, and then store the peeled beets for a week/two weeks.

SO our salad was a bed of baby arugula, golden beets sliced as big, round coins, and avocado sliced into thin slices.

Now, let me speak on avocados too and explain why they're here: Annalena is a seasonal, local cook; however, she breaks from that mode when there is a food that is not grown locally, and is at its prime. If she didn't, there would be no olive oil, no parmesan, no oranges, no pineapples, no coffee. So, the avocados were sliced and put onto the salad with the beets, and then the blueberries, just strewn over the top.

Then, the dressing. Ah, the dressing. Remember I said we were having fish? And you all remember Annalena's diatribe about dairy and fish? So our dressing was a dairy base. Champagne vinaigrette, first. One part. A sprinkle of salt. Then 1/4 part of dijon mustard. Then, two parts creme fraiche. Shaken up. Finally, three parts olive oil. Taste. Add more salt, and taste again.

And there you had it. A salad that will make you proud. Fruits, vegetables, all sorts of good things.

If you are afraid of salad, get over it. Lettuces are not especially good for you, but have some fun, put something in the salad that IS good for you, and have a good end of the meal experience. You may not even want dessert.