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Water-Baby Salad
This turns out to be excellent, unfussy, and uncontrived. Into a salad bowl, over 3 cups baby romaine and 2 cups frisee lettuce, throw a generous handful toasted almond slices, 30 or so baby shrimp, 4 radishes' worth paper-thin radish slices, and 3/4 pound haricots verts that have been thrown into boiling water for less than a minute, then plunged into ice water and flash-chilled for 30 seconds so they're still crisp.
For the green lime-olive vinaigrette: whisk together very good olive oil with balsamic vinegar and lime juice to taste. Add 1 minced garlic clove, 2 teaspoons minced fresh tarragon, 2 teaspoons wet mustard, black pepper, and a good pinch of sugar. Add to salad and toss well.
Chapter Five
...The soup bowls were whisked away and plates of summery salad replaced them: a Japanese-woodcut sea of curly pale-green frisee lettuce on which floated toasted-almond-slice rafts, each holding a tiny, near-translucent poached baby shrimp as pink and naked as a newborn. Crisp-blanched haricots verts darted through the sea like needle nose fish. Cerise-rimmed radish slices bobbed here and there like sea foam. The dressing was a briny green lime juice and olive oil emulsion. Maxine stared at the thing, trying to imagine the person who had so painstakingly made it. It would be demolished in three bites. She would have been perfectly happy with a wedge of iceberg with a glop of bottled Russian dressing, like you got in the olden days. Food had become so fussy and contrived lately...
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