Recipe: Strawberry Salsa!

Recently, I decided to buy a completely obscene amount of strawberries.  We're talking several pounds of strawberries.  So, for our neighborhood Cinco de Mayo bash, I made some strawberry salsa.  It came out really well, especially for a first attempt at salsa, plus salsa can be used in a ton of diet-friendly recipes; sweet salsas pair nicely with salmon, pork, chicken, etc.  Here are the ingredients:

1 lb strawberries, diced
1 lb tomatoes, diced - try to find an especially flavorful variety
2 jalapeno peppers (one of them seeded, one with the seeds), sliced
1 small yellow onion, diced
Fresh cilantro, finely chopped, to taste - I love a ton of cilantro, so I used a lot of it.
Salt and pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl.  If you like your salsa as pictured below, then you can stop here.  This results in a very mild salsa (obviously, you can add more jalapeno and include more of the seeds to up the ante spice-wise).

However, I prefer it this way:

To do this, just stick the salsa into a blender and pulse until you get a consistency like the one in the picture.  This style keeps a lot longer, too, so we left ours in an airtight container overnight in the fridge, which made it REALLY tasty.  It went over quite well for Cinco de Mayo.  It's still pretty mild by salsa standards, but I personally prefer it that way (again, if you like it spicy, just keep on adding those jalapenos!).

Enjoy!

Salad Wars: The Strawberry Strikes Back

Tonight's Salad Wars won me my first victory - for my first Salad Wars submission!  Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.  Even David liked this one the best, and he's not usually a fan of sweet salads.  Here's what I used:

Glorious strawberries!!

Almost done...

...et voila!

I used mixed greens, mandarin orange sections, sliced strawberries (used an egg slicer to do those - turned out quite well in the end!), candied pecans, goat cheese, raspberry vinaigrette dressing and some chicken sauted in bouquet garni and minced garlic.

It was pretty glorious, but I have a few notes.  Number one, you could also substitute apples in place of the mandarin oranges for less calories, but the oranges are pretty glorious.  Number two, you could probably also substitute plain pecans for candied ones to cut the calories as well - the candied ones I found were a huge calorie bomb, and still not as tasty as the ones they use in restaurants, so I can only imagine what the nutrition information on those looks like.  You could also substitute another mildly sweet (or slightly salty) crunchy things - you just need to keep something crunchy.  Number three, the chicken could definitely have been better - I should have grilled it or done it with salt and/or salted butter - it just wasn't fabulous, probably because we realized at zero hour that it was past dinner time, I hadn't started dinner yet, and the chicken was still in the freezer.  We had to microwave-thaw it, which works in a pinch but which I do not generally recommend.  Number four, I kind of wished I'd used a sweeter dressing - this raspberry vinaigrette was not at all sweet, and we have a raspberry walnut dressing that I'd have much preferred with this salad.

However, all that said, I am currently winning Salad Wars, and I definitely think it's justified!  It was absolutely delicious, and the perfect antidote to my extremely stressful day of volunteering today!

Salad Wars: Return of the Vinegar

So one of my husband's, well, quirkier habits is that he likes to brew weird things like kombucha or homemade vinegar in our fridge.  Generally, I don't love it - ok, I flat-out hate kombucha, it's like drinking rancid mold - but I live with it, because it makes him happy and the vinegar sometimes makes awesome salad dressings.  Which it got to do this evening in Round 2 of the Salad Wars.

My husband got another chance at making the awesomest salad ever this evening.  Here's his creation:

It's sort of a regular mixed-green salad underneath with a diner-style smothered chicken dish on top (chicken, mushrooms, cheese).  My husband loves this type of combination, though I'm a wee bit more set in my ways about what constitutes a salad, so I ate the two parts separately.  What I will say is that each of the individual parts was excellent.  And it was super-awesome that one of his salads was made using the vinegar he's been brewing (or whatever it is that you do with vinegar - let it sit in a cool, dark place, from what I can tell).

With it, I had a Woodchuck hard cider, which I personally believe is about the most delicious alcoholic beverage around:

It's quite tasty, and seems to be taking off, which is awesome to see.  I have been a fan of cider ever since studying abroad in Brittany, the region of France where they have... and I don't want to oversell this here... the BEST cider on the PLANET.  I'm psyched to see Americans jumping on the cider wagon more than we have in the past.  It's good stuff.

So tomorrow's episode of the Salad Wars will likely be a chicken/strawberry/sugared pecan/mixed veggie/cucumber/feta salad with a light raspberry dressing.  Or a chicken Waldorf salad.  I haven't decided yet.  In the immortal words of Basil Fawlty, "Sorry, I think we're fresh out of Waldorfs..."

After Round 2 of the Salad Wars, his Burmese salad is in the lead.  I have two nights in a row to defeat it before his next salad creation.

Well played, husband... well played...

Today proved to be quite an eventful day despite an impending cold (sniff, sniff).  We had a particularly thrilling trip to Ikea.  More on that when my camera is up and running...

Tonight was Night One of the soon-to-be-legendary Salad Wars.  I really think my Caprese salad of last night should count...

I mean, it's basically the prettiest Caprese salad ever!  But I digress...

We're doing the Salad Wars in an attempt to get healthier around here, and we're trying to cut back on our meat consumption.  Not entirely, mind you, but salads are a great opportunity to load up on the veggie part and use the meat sparingly.  Pasta salads are allowable under the rules, but only if there are TONS of veggies - we're talking 1/2 veggies, 1/2 pasta.  It's tough to lose weight in a city full of pierogis and Primanti's sandwiches, or where a cheeseburger omelet is a valid menu option, but we're determined to do it.

So far, my major annoyance is how goshdarn expensive produce is.  For years, every time I've done my weekly grocery run, I've always thought to myself that it's no wonder we're so overweight in this country.  It would be cheaper to buy your own house with a large backyard so you can start a garden than to pay these exorbitant produce prices.  Possibly more frustrating is how much more expensive the local, organic, ethical choices are.  More on this another day...

Tonight, my darling husband put together a remarkably delicious Burmese-style salad:

Sorry about the quality of today's photos; I'll charge my phone tomorrow so I can post better photos for the rest of the Salad Wars.  In any case, he used chopped cabbage, shredded carrots, bean sprouts, chicken, tofu, sesame seeds and little garlic crunchies, as well as the tomato, basil and lime you see on the side there.  The dressing involved oil that had had some garlic and onion cooked in it and then removed, tahini, lime, salt, pepper, and perhaps one or two other things, as well as some fish oil in his dressing.  Delicious!  Even better, he made me a gin and tonic to go with it!  And while I didn't really drink much of it (tomorrow's a work day, after all), it definitely won him extra points!

So tomorrow I'm really going to have to bring my A game...