Salad for August
Today is not hot enough to make me want a big salad for lunch. It’s perfectly possible that it won’t get that hot until next summer, but there are never any guarantees in Umbria. This salad was made when Shelly and Larry came to lunch some days ago. It wasn’t hot that day, either, but we thought it would be.
The salad underneath is seasonal greens with various delicious things arranged in patterns on top. There are mild onion bits, marinated artichoke hearts, dry-cured black olives, salted green olives, chunks of ripe tomato, chunks of avocado and slices of cucumber. In the center at the top are flash-steamed scallops from the Isle of Man. This is not an ideal way to cook them, but I was curious. Arranged in a ring are two different kinds of shrimps, peeled and cooked. Mazzancolle is one type and I cannot tell you why they are different. Gamberoni, or “big shrimp”, are the others. It’s very much an arranged salad, meant to look as good as it tastes.
The shrimps are prepared with a lime sauce before being arranged on the salad.
Lime Sauce
finely grated lime peel from 1/2 lime
juice from 1/2 lime
finely minced parsley
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
salt to taste
Mix those things together and toss the shrimps in it as soon as they come off the heat. Leave to marinate not more than 10 minutes.
The salad dressing I served is Strawberry Vinaigrette, which has a strong and intriguing scent, but doesn’t alter the taste very much. It’s good, but more interesting than good.
Strawberry Vinaigrette
Make strawberry vinegar at least 2 weeks ahead. Fill a jar with clean whole strawberries then cover them with cider vinegar. Leave them to marinate the whole 2 weeks and then strain off the beautiful red vinegar and cork it until you need it.
1 tablespoon of strawberry vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
1 heaped teaspoon prepared mustard
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil.
Shake it up, baby, and take a sniff. I have to try this with honey one day for fruit salad dressing.
I made homemade rolls to go with this and I thought they were warm and yummy. I don’t know why we don’t eat like this more often in Italy.
My theory is there is so much good stuff to eat, repeats are infrequent, unless it is something you are really in love with.
This time of year, we eat LOTS of sweet corn fresh from the garden, along with tomatoes and cucumbers. I’ve almost stopped with the zucchini.
Today I made fresh salsa with stuff mostly from my garden. I do not grow onion, and the black beans were canned. I took this to the church picnic today, and had chips to go with it, but many just ate it like salad.
It all sounds just right. What I referred to is that in Italy we continue to eat hot cooked foods and only rarely eat something cool like this. Meal salads are very hard to find. Why, I don’t know, unless it refers to times when farm workers needed substantial food and the rivher had servants to sweat for them!
I made a tasty “meal salad” the other day with leftover rotisserie chicken and whatever else I could find that needed to be finished up before it went off. As I was eating it, I told myself I really need to do this more often…those shrimp look/sound fab!
This climate was made for salad meals. Down with summer gnocchi!