Friday, April 15, 2011

Create-a-Salad


It's been just one thing after another at the moment and I am busy doing my accreditation for work this year (10 months or so of permanent guilt that I'm not going to get it because I haven't tried hard enough) so the cooking in my home has reverted back to the standards - Spaghetti Bolognaise, Apricot Chicken, throw together roasts, freezer chicken kiev etc etc.

I'm just about dying of food boredom. That's the trouble with developing fancy tastes - you just can't go back.

So when my sister and her boyfriend came for dinner all the way from jolly old England I thought I'd go nuts with a summery Aussie salad to welcome them. Unfortunately it rained all day which kind of takes the joy out of salad so I did salad and roast chicken which worked very nicely.

The salad was great fun to make. I went shopping without a list and picked up all the things I like in salads with no thought about how they go together - fortunately it worked and was a big tough manly meal of a salad (if anything can be manly that has figs in it :)

So here's the list of salad ingredients from a woman who shopped with abandon at finally having the opportunity to make something interesting for a change!

Rocket
Fresh Figs
Goats Cheese
Pancetta
Macadamia Nuts
Lemon juice
Dijon mustard
Nice Olive Oil


Crisp up the pancetta in a pan, lose any leftover fat and then toast the Macadamias so they get charred and warm with pancetta flavour.

I did the dressing in a jar with equal amounts of oil and lemon juice, a teaspoon of dijon and a drizzle of honey. Shake until combined.

Toss the whole lot together and enjoy. I really enjoyed it and there were no leftovers so I suspect other people did too! I was so happy with the final product (and incidentally - the photo! Love it when you accidentally get a great image with a point and shoot - I'm no photographer!)

Have a lovely week.

PS. I finally got a picture up of the Lemon polenta cake on the previous post for those who wanted to know what it looked like!