We never eat at the kitchen table.\u00c2\u00a0 Dad and I tend to take our meals in front of the TV.\u00c2\u00a0 Or sometimes just one of us will eat at the table while the other watches TV.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m thinking that we may have eaten dinner at the table together once this year.<\/p>\n
Last night, Sparks came over and we not only ate at the table, all of the food was on it instead of sitting on the counters\/stove.\u00c2\u00a0 It was very nice.<\/p>\n
I started making dad’s chicken marsala, but he decided to elbow me out of the way and take over.\u00c2\u00a0 He does that from time to time, I just laughed and went on.\u00c2\u00a0 Besides, it freed me up to work on the rest of dinner.\u00c2\u00a0 Mostly, it freed me up to get creative with my salad.<\/p>\n
I didn’t go to the store yesterday, everything that was in the fridge had been there since my grocery trip last weekend.\u00c2\u00a0 I had a bag of mixed spinach and red leaf lettuce, but not much else in the way of salad veggies.\u00c2\u00a0 I toasted up some pine nuts, which I always try to keep on hand, but what else to put in the salad?\u00c2\u00a0 Hmmmm…<\/p>\n
I opted to get a bit sweet with it.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d bought a mango last week and it was at the peak of ripeness.\u00c2\u00a0 Actually, it was probably closer to the “eat me now before I rot” stage, but whatever.\u00c2\u00a0 So, I diced it up and threw it on top of the lettuce.\u00c2\u00a0 What sort of dressing for a mango salad?\u00c2\u00a0 I squeezed the pulp that was still sticking to the pit (seed?) and skin into a cup, added the juice from half a lime, and a few frozen raspberries.\u00c2\u00a0 I put the whole thing in the microwave on defrost until I could mash the raspberries up, then added a little balsamic vinegar.\u00c2\u00a0 I gave it a little salt, but the whole thing was still a bit too POW with the vinegar, so I poured in a bit of the reisling that I was drinking.\u00c2\u00a0 Then whisked in some olive oil.\u00c2\u00a0 A nice complement for the salad.\u00c2\u00a0 Dad refused to touch the salad, too weird for him, but Sparks and I rather liked it.\u00c2\u00a0 Perhaps, if I make it again, I’ll add some more crunch with some carrots or something.\u00c2\u00a0 Overall, I thought the salad was a good contrast to the heavy richness of the rest of the meal.<\/p>\n
What have we learned here?\u00c2\u00a0 Durn near anything can go in a salad, as long as you combine it with the right dressing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We never eat at the kitchen table.\u00c2\u00a0 Dad and I tend to take our meals in front of the TV.\u00c2\u00a0 Or sometimes just one of us will eat at the table while the other watches TV.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m thinking that we may have eaten dinner at the table together once this year. Last night, Sparks came […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experimental-kitchenry","category-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dementedramblings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}