Summer for me is all about fresh fruit and vegetables, and cooking things lightly if at all. This is a lovely salad that is best with the freshest veggies you can find, in whatever proportions suit you on that day. The ones listed below are just the ones I used today, though in the past it’s included spinach, onions, watercress, apples and chives, in addition to and instead of those. You can also skip the polenta, which I just like for a different texture, or add croutons instead right before the vinegar step for yet another.
Sample Ingredients:
Carrots
Tomatoes
Hungarian Peppers
Cucumber
Lettuce or other greens
Polenta cake
Fresh basil
Crumbled goat cheese
White wine vinegar
Marsala
Olive oil
Mustard Seed
Salt, Pepper
Wash and dice all your veggies, and cut the polenta cake into 1/4 inch cubes, keeping the lettuce separate from the other ingredients. Heat the mustard seed in some oil (not too much! I used about 1 tablespoon) in a pan with salt until they start jumping about. Now add your polenta, and cook it for about a minute over high heat. Next, add your veggies and basil (not lettuce/greens), stir-fry for about a minute, and then reduce the heat to medium and cook till they’re all the texture you like. Meanwhile, mix the vinegar and a little bit of Marsala in a glass, with a few shakes of salt and drops of oil.
Remove all that to a bowl, and toss the lettuce on top. As it begins to wilt, turn the heat back up to high in your pan, and deglaze it with your vinegar mixture. When that’s reduced by about a quarter to half, pour the hot liquid over your lettuce and toss in the goat cheese. That will kinda melt in; taste it now and add salt and pepper as you like.
You could add hard boiled eggs too, if you wanted to, or bacon might also be nice. As I said, this is really just a template, the basic idea being that the lettuce isn’t really cooked itself at all, but just wilted by the heat of everything else. Actually none of it is full cooked except the polenta and sometimes I caramelize some of the veggies, but really it all means that you’ve got warm salad with little bursts of cool lettuce where the heat didn’t get to it, which is really nice.