Saladosity, Part 13: Bleu Cheese and Pecans

[This is the thirteenth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

I know it’s been a long journey, but we’ve finally arrived at one of my favorite—and one of the simplest—salads to make with our base veggies and collected condiments and accoutrements.  Just bear with me for a couple more sections, while I explain my:

Salad-Making Lingo

To keep the “recipes” for my salads simple, I’m going to present them all the same way:

• “base veggies” – This just means, take those base veggies you chopped last time and throw them in a bowl.  If you separated any out so they could keep longer, such as cucumbers or romaine, toss them back in at this point.  Quantity of veggies is entirely up to you: how big a salad do you want to make?  For me, the vast majority of the time, this is not a “side” salad; this is pretty much all I’m going to be eating for the given meal.  So just pick whatever size bowl you want, and fill it perhaps ¾ of the way up with the veggies.  You just need a little head-room for a few extras, the dressing, and the tossing.
• extras – In my version of salad, what veggies you use is irrelevant.  It’s the extras (and the dressing, of course) that makes the salad unique.  I generally just list these.  How much should you add?  However much you like.  Do you want a salad with cheese, or a cheesy salad? a salad with crunchy bits, or a crunchy salad?  It’s all up to you.  Typically I put equal parts of my extras; if there’s an exception to that, I’ll call it out in the “recipe.”
• dressing – If the dressing is one that you need to make, we’ll do a separate recipe for that.  Here, I’ll just tell you whether you want light, medium, or heavy dressing.  What do those terms mean?  Well, I’m intentionally leaving it up to you, but here’s a useful guideline:
• “light” dressing – Less that you would normally put on your salad.
• “medium” dressing – About what you would normally put on a salad.
• “heavy” dressing – A bit more than you would normally put on the salad.

I generally put “recipe” in quotes here, because you’re just throwing some stuff in a bowl and mixing it up; calling that a “recipe” is generous at best.  And, oh yeah: maybe a quick word about:

Mixing the Salad

Mixing a salad is often the only challenging part of making the damn thing.  The problem is, once you get the right size bowl, and you fill it up, it becomes practically impossible to actually stir it all up without making a huge mess.  And, at least in my view, nothing is worse than a salad where all the parts are separated.  I’m a firm believer in getting a little bit of each flavor (and texture) in every bite.  So, what’s the solution?

Well, the naive answer is always: just get a bigger bowl.  Duh.  And this seems like an obvious solution.  But I don’t particularly like it.  Because either you’re going to eat out of the bigger bowl, or you’re not.  If you’re going to eat out of the bigger bowl, there are two problems.  The smaller one is that eating out of a giant bowl is awkward.  The bigger one, though, is science demonstrates fairly conclusively that, if you use bigger plates and bowls and whatnot, then you’ll give yourself bigger portions.  And bigger portions—even bigger portions of healthy stuff like salad—is just not good for you.  So I don’t like that option.  On the other hand, what you could do is just portion the salad in the bowl you plan to eat out of, then dump that in the bigger bowl, mix it all up, then dump it back in the smaller bowl.  Which will certainly work, and that may end up becoming your go-to option—if that works for you, go for it.

But I still don’t like it, because it creates more dishes for me to wash, plus they’re big dishes.  Bigger dishes are always a pain in the butt because they’re taking up more room in the dishwasher.  It’s a trivial thing, but it irks me.  What I really want is for someone to invent a bowl that comes with a retractible, dome-shaped lid ... a bit like that lid you get on your Slurpee cup, only it would just slide back and forth instead of you having to attach and detach it.  Until someone invents that brilliant piece of dinnerware, I just make my own.

Take a bowl that’s even smaller than your bowl you want to be eating out of, and flip it upside down and put it on top of the eating bowl.  If the two bowls have roughly the same diameter, it should fit fairly neatly.  And, surprisingly, most bowls (outside serving bowls) do have roughly the same diameter: the difference in sizes is usually more about the depth than the width.  Now just take your two-bowl concoction and just shake it: back and forth, up and down, twist it a little ... whatever turns you on.  Remove the “lid” and you have a perfectly tossed salad.  You still have an extra dish to wash, sure, but at least it’s a little one.  Not too shabby, eh?

Finally, here’s our first salad.

Bleu Cheese Pecan Salad

One day at my Trader Joe’s I was looking for dip.  Typically we don’t eat a lot of chips and dip in our house—chips are one of those things that it’s super easy to overeat, so I try to save it for a special occasion.  But of course New Year’s Eve is a special occasion, and that’s when we eat the vast majority of our chips and dip for the year.  So at the end of December one year, several years back, I was looking for something interesting to dip some chips in.  Hey: I like French onion dip as much as the next guy, and I absolutely adore a 7-layer-style dip for tortilla chips, but sometimes you just want something different, ya know?  Anyways, I stumbled across this bleu-cheese-pecan dip, and I though, hunh ... that sounds like it might be good.  And it was, in fact, amazing: I think TJ’s still carries it, so you should definitely try it out sometime.

But, more importantly, I was inspired by how well the two flavors melded, when I had never really thought of them as a natural pairing before.  Thus, this salad was created.  If for some reason you don’t like pecans, you could subsitute other nuts—I’ve tried this varation with almonds, cashews, and pistachios, in fact, and various combinations of all of them—but I still think pecans are the absolute best.

• base veggies
• bleu cheese crumbles
• pecans
• feta cheese dressing (medium)

Now, you may remember that we specifically bought pre-crumbled bleu cheese, thus making adding bleu cheese to a salad trivial: no choppping, no mess, just dump some in the bowl.  We also talked about buying a decent pre-made feta cheese dressing which was close to Whole30-compliant—obviously it’s got dairy in it, so it’s not really Whole30-safe, but it has no added sugars of any kind, no soybean oil, etc.  I think it’s a pretty healthy dressing, and, remember, one of only two that I buy pre-made.  So that’s super-simple too.

And, the thing about dumping some of that creamy, feta cheese dressing on top of the bleu cheese crumbles is, it makes a better bleu cheese dressing than anything you could ever buy, and I’m guessing better than many you could make yourself.  Certainly it was way easier than making bleu cheese dressing from scratch.  And, while we will be making some dressings from scratch—never fear!—every once in a while it’s nice to have an alternative that costs you zero extra effort.

And this salad is really good.  This is not my go-to for a really big dinner salad (we’ll come to that one in the fullness of time), but for a lighter dinner (or maybe a big lunch), this is an excellent choice.  And it requires the absolute least effort of any of the salads I’m going to show you, so I eat it quite often.  Give it a shot.  Despite the simplicity, I think you’ll be very pleased.  Very pleased indeed.

Next time, we’ll ratchet up the complexity just a tiny notch, and I’ll show you my favorite “snack” salad.