Buffalo Chicken Salad

Who's excited for fall?  

*raises hand*  

Let me start by thanking the weather gods because this summer has been absolutely amazing in terms of nice weather in Western Washington.  We kinda got robbed last year.  That being said, I may be the minority here but I'm entirely too excited to see the temperature drop so I can bust out the sweaters and boots.  Even for being a Florida native my entire life, I just cannot get enough cool weather. Of course, I could do with less rain but I'll take a cool rainy (entire) day over triple digit heat and still-wet-after-toweling-post-shower humidity. Yuck.  Don't miss that.  

Not only are the clothes cuter, in Seattle it signals the end of no-way-in-hell-am-I-turning-this-oven-on season.  

When I first moved to the Pacific Northwest and I was scoping out apartments, I was appalled to learn the thermostats didn't equal air conditioner - it controlled the heater.  Only.  I looked at the lady renting the apartment funny.  Huh? 

That means if it's 95 degrees out and you have a west facing window that isn't shaded by a beautiful greenbelt, you are sleeping in your skivvies with the windows wide open.  I just didn't grow up with open windows in the house.  We lived and died by whether or not our A/C was kickin'.  But that's the nice thing, if you DO end up trying to escape stifling heat by way of windows, you won't wake up having to worry about giant flying vermin (such as mosquitoes, horse flies or palmetto bugs..aka flying freaking cockroaches) flying in to your room at night.  

Spiders are more the NW pests.  Spiders and slugs.  Oh god, the slugs.  I find them gross but I should try to capture a video of my mom reacting to these slugs out there.  You'd think they were some sort of deadly spastic creature that can jump on your and suck your blood or something.  She literally convulses in disgust and scurries away like a crazy person.  Gabe and I find it both hilarious and ridiculous.  

Nature shock.  

My current obsession is anything w/ buffalo sauce and while the weather is starting to turn cooler, I had the pleasure of dreaming this up one night it was still warm enough to warrant not cooking anything over a hot stove.

I always have a rotisserie chicken from the store in my fridge to make sandwiches, quesadillas, whip up a quick dinner, etc.  I just use some of the meat mixed w/ Frank's for the chicken.  Comes together super quick and you're not withering away over a hot stove trying to bring life-giving sustenance to your family, man!



Buffalo Chicken Salad
Serves 1 (but easily scaleable for more)

The measurements are intentionally loose so you can scale to your own taste.  Plus I didn't think it practical to direct you to put 1/2 a bottle of buffalo sauce on your chicken like I do.

1/2 - 1 c. cooked chicken
buffalo sauce to taste
2-3 c. butter lettuce
1 stalk organic celery (why organic?  read this about the dirty dozen)
4-6 grape tomatoes, sliced
1 scallion
chopped cilantro to taste
blue or gorganzola cheese (all I had was feta in the fridge)
blue cheese or ranch dressing

Slice or tear chicken into bite size pieces and toss with buffalo sauce.  Assemble salad layering lettuce, celery, tomatoes, chicken scallions, cilantro and dressing.

Bacon would obviously be awesome on here also.

Raw Asparagus Herbed Quinoa Salad

My mom is a great lady. She's one of those sweet, caring (sometimes overbearing) Chinese ladies that likes to shop and go have weekend dim sum. Being an only daughter, she always had advice for me - whether I wanted it or not. My mom always means well but her well-meaning advice comes off sometimes misguided and often in the form of crazy Chinese superstitions and old wives' tales. Some of her gems of advice I endured as a confused child (which has definitely bled into adulthood):

• Don't go to bed w/ wet hair


• Don't drink anything cold when Aunt Flow is in town


• Don't wipe your face w/ a kitchen towel


• Don't sleep w/ anywhere where there's a draft blowing air directly on you


• Don't sweep your front door during Chinese New Year


• Don't laugh too hard before sleeping


• Don't look out the window after dark


• Don't eat meat on your bday


• Don't let men eat leftover eggs (Gabe had a field day w/ this one)

I always ask her for a justification behind the crazy Chinese advice and she always just pacifies me by telling me she doesn't know and she heard it from her mom or grandmother. She also told me not to eat raw veggies and actually entertained me by providing a rather ominous consequence that it could make you grow unwanted facial hair . What sort of crazy person tells all this insane advice to a child?

For the aforementioned reasons, I never really grew up eating any kind of raw veggies. I have however, seen a slew of raw asparagus recipes (including this one - delish!) and all I have to say is, I'm a FAN. Bring on the facial hair.

Raw Asparagus Herbed Quinoa Salad

1-1/3 c. quinoa (cook according to package instructions)
8-10 stalks asparagus (about 1/2 inch diameter if possible)
2 tbsp. flat leaf parsley, chopped
2 tbsp. cilantro, chopped
1 scallion, chopped
1/4 c. sliced almonds, toasted
1/4 c. dried cranberries
1 meyer lemon (about 1/4 to 1/3 c. juice, you'd be surprised how much the quinoa absorbs)
2 tbsp. EVOO
1/2 tsp. salt
pepper to taste

Cook quinoa according to package instructions (I always use my rice cooker and cook it w/ the same 1:1 ratio) - don't forget to add a dash of salt to the stuff before you hit the button. Wash and thinly slice the asparagus on the bias.

After the quinoa is finished cooking, add the chopped herbs to let them mellow slightly (unless you like the punch of fresh fresh herbs). After the mix comes to room temp, add the rest of the ingredients, toss and serve immediately. If making ahead, leave the almonds out until just before service so they don't get soggy.

I've been out of commission w/ the blog for several months! It's sad. I wish I had more time to do it and promised I would after getting acclimated w/ the new job. We'll see how consistent I can be. Thanks for stopping by!

Roasted Beet & Tomato Salad

Sorry for the lack of posting. And I'm also sorry that the few posts that I have put out, they're all about salad. I hate salads as you may know.

Anyhow, I'm really truly trying to get back into my blog but the summer's here but it's hard getting motivated to look at a computer after staring at a computer for 9 hours a day. If you're living in the Northwest, we use the word 'summer' pretty loosely considering it's been mostly cloudy and cool..but far better than being in the heat wave and flooding the rest of the US has been encountering). I love summer. It means farmers markets, sun dresses & tanned skin (no fake n' bake, please).

I hit up a farmers markets with a few girlfriends a few weeks ago and was inspired by these gorgeous bright yellow-orange beets. Yes, beets. I've never cooked beets but they claimed it was very easy to do..and they were right! After a rather long day of eating dim sum, baseball food at a Mariner's game and other various junk, I felt like Gabe and I should redeem ourselves w/ a light dinner. This is the lovely little ditty is what resulted.

Roasted Beet & Tomato Salad

makes 2 dinner sized salad portions

4 beets (mine were between a large egg and a baseball sized)
1½ c. grape tomatoes
3 tbsp. crumbled feta cheese (blue cheese would also be excellent)
2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil (more for roasting beets)
2 tbsp. fresh basil
salt & pepper to taste
1 thinly sliced red onion, optional

Preheat oven to 375ºF. Wash and dry beets to remove excess dirt (do not peel). Drizzle w/ 2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil and sprinkle w/ ½ tsp. kosher salt. Wrap in a foil packet and roast for 1 hour. Depending on the size of your beets, you may have to adjust cooking time. Beets act like potatoes, when they're done, they are fork tender. Remove from the oven and allow to cool - skins should slide off easily. I just made the beets ahead of time and threw them in the fridge.

Peel and slice beets, arrange on the bottom of the plate. Slice tomatoes and pile on top of beets. Sprinkle w/ feta (add red onion) - salt, pepper, EVOO. Slice basil in small ribbons (stack leaves, roll like a cigar and with a very sharp knife slice thin ribbons) and sprinkle on top - enjoy!

Another note about the beets - as you may or may not have heard, they bleed and stain everything. I just used a dark cutting board and did all the skin removal in the foil packet. Even when you are washing, if you scrub the skins too hard, they'll start bleeding so be careful & try not to use a light colored porous cutting surface. These were even the lighter colored orange beets - if all you can find is the dark red ones, be especially careful!

New Fave Salad

I never thought I'd post about a salad, let alone one that I would actually use 'fave' in the title but this one's really yum. I'm kinda at work on my lunch break and I'm feeling super guilty that it's already July and I only posted one recipe last month. So this one's a little half post.

Sorry for the iPhone photo. This salad would be really yum w/ a piece of fish or some chicken too but the beans and almonds give it a lot of body. Enjoy!

Feta Almond White Bean Salad

serves 1

2 c. arugula (romaine works well too)

1/2 c. sliced cucumber (I use hot house)

1/2 c. cannellini beans (drained and rinsed thoroughly)

1/4 c. crumbled feta cheese

1/4 c. slivered almonds, toasted

2 tbsp. The Family Dressing

I didn't think you needed instructions on making a salad either. Enjoy friends!

The Family Dressing & My Salad Diatribe

I've gotta be honest, salads are NOT my thing. Now, grits...grits are my thing. Bacon, yes please. Anything w/ cheese? Where do I sign? Yes. Salads? Eeh [shiver]..salad. It may as well be a four letter word in my book. No. No likey the salads.

That is until I married into this family and they introduced me to The Family Dressing. I feel like I'm referring to a big Italian family when I say that. But they're not Italian.

All kidding aside, I really had to change my mindset about salads.

• First, I cannot stand iceberg lettuce. It has absolutely NO nutritional value and it's flavorless. Well, until you dump some ranch dressing and a heap of bacon. Then I'll eat the hell out of some iceberg lettuce. But that just defeats the whole purpose of salads. It took me a long time to convince myself that salads don't need to include iceberg lettuce. In fact, they don't need to have any lettuce at all. I can tolerate spinach or arugula as a leafy base - but most of the time, I make chunky veggie salads (and I add an obscene about of homemade garlic sourdough croutons to the point that you can almost call it a panzanella but in my mind, it still counts as a salad).
• Second, I really only started eating salads to make myself feel less guilty about this pizza I tried of PW's. The pizza has changed my life. Seriously. We've had it for about a week straight and nobody's complaining. I'll blog about my own personal spin on it some time, but for now - stick w/ me on this salad stuff. Whenever I make this pizza, I make a huge salad. While I'm at work, I look forward to it when I'm thinking about what I'm going to be eating for dinner, it's sick. The pizza. It consumes me.
• Third (and skip to the next bullet point if you're squeamish), if you're anything thing like me, sometimes my erratic eating habits throw my..system into disarray. You people know what I'm talking about. The pipes. The pipes..they get upset. And I was watching this segment about colon health on the Rachael Ray Show. Bottom line - most of us (yours truly included) don't get enough fiber. And don't front - we all want a clean and healthy colon. I told Gabe I want his colon to be a picture of health. Ours will be the colons of 'healthy' people those posters in the doctor's office next to the 'unhealthy' colons. This bullet is especially poignant to me since unhealthy colons run in my family.
• Forth, well. There is no forth. To sum up bullet #3 in case you skipped it, eat more fiber!

Needless to say, this dressing is the only way you'll get me to eat a salad. I always have all six of these ingredients in stock so I never really have an excuse to not make my own dressing. That and this dressing is gooooooood.

Here's all you'll need:
Set up my little station over here..
Grate the garlic. Add more if you like just make sure you grate or mash into a paste. I love a strong garlic flavor as much as the next person, I don't, however, enjoy biting into raw garlic pieces.
There we go.

Adding the salt.

Love kosher salt.

Dijon mustard has definitely grown on me since I was a kid. It's a strong flavor too but such a small amount in this dressing means you can barely taste it. I like it now though so some days if I get a wild hair, I throw in an extra tsp.

10 or so cracks of freshly ground black pepper, about 1/2 a tsp. or so.

Doesn't this look like a tangerine? I know. I thought about adjusting the color but it truly is an orange-ish yellow. They're Meyer lemons and the difference is, they've cross a regular lemon with a mandarin orange. The result is a less acidic lemon with all the lemon flavor. But even when I squeeze these things, they smell like mandarin oranges to me, it's the strangest thing.

They're SUPER juicy too - they yield much more juice than a regular lemon. Downside? The zest. As I mentioned before, the true lemon essence is gone - this thing smells like a mandarin orange. I can't use the zest to make lemon simple syrup anymore. Regardless, I still love them.

Are you weirded out by the color as much as I am? I'm having to focus on the mustard to gauge the true color of the lemon.

This is the juice of only 1/2 the lemon.

I like to go full tilt with the acid. Focus on the mustard. It's just my crappy camera. I'm not squeezing an orange.

Glad that's behind us.

Baby whisk.

Then I looked over at my little garbage bag I keep while I'm cooking and thought of how great it would be if I had a little compost bin... Then I started thinking of all those worms and how I'm afraid of worms. And slugs. How am I going to grow those tomato plants I promised myself I would last year after visiting Momma Sally & Sarah and seeing all their gorgeous produce?

Back to the dressing. Focus, Ng.

Extra virgin olive oil. Has to be EV. First cold pressed. Then your dressing will taste nice and fruity..NOT oily.

Whisk, whisk, whisk.

Looks good. Check for seasoning now..

I personally like a little extra salt in mine. I like salt.

Another 1/2 tsp. should do.

5 more cracks of pepper too.

Top your favorite SALAD with this and thank me later.

And I couldn't resist. Here's that damn pizza I'm obsessed with.. Eggplant, fresh garlic, prosciutto & fresh basil. That's right folks. I have access to fresh, cheap BASIL in February. Take THAT old man winter!

The Family Dressing

makes about 1 cup of dressing

2 cloves garlic
1 1/2 tsp. kosher salt
1/2 tsp. fresh pepper
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
juice of 1 lemon (about 1/4 c., I prefer Meyer lemons)
2/3 c. extra virgin olive oil

With a microplane, finely grate 2 cloves of garlic or mashed into a paste with chef's knife. You can definitely add more garlic if you like, sometimes if I feel like vampires are following me, I'll grate in an extra clove. Add in salt, pepper mustard and lemon juice, whisk until combined. Slowly drizzle olive oil while whisking vigorously until blended. Enjoy!