Salad Day no. 1

We find ourselves mired in the first genuinely hot week of the year. Summer, my friends, is my least favorite season but at least eating salads makes it endurable. Our menu for the week is a string of salads. And here is the first one, originally from Taste of Home magazine. We have altered it very little, cutting down on the onion because breathing fire is not a desirable side effect of dinner for us. Also, because cherry tomatoes are beyond our budget and our own plants aren't bearing fruit yet, we chopped larger tomatoes into comparable chunks.



Asparagus Mozzarella Salad

Salad Ingredients:
2 pounds fresh asparagus, trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 pound fresh mozzarella cheese, cubed
2 cups chopped tomatoes (or grape or cherry tomatoes)
1 small shallot, halved and sliced
1/4 cup minced fresh basil

Dressing Ingredients:
1/4 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 garlic clove, minced
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2 tablespoons lemon juice

In a large saucepan, bring 1/2 in. of water to a boil. Add asparagus; cover and boil for 3 minutes. Drain and immediately place asparagus in ice water. Drain and pat dry. Transfer to a large bowl. Add the cheese, tomatoes, onion and basil.
In a small bowl, whisk the oil, vinegar, garlic, salt, mustard and pepper. Pour over salad; toss to coat. Drizzle with lemon juice. Chill until serving. Yield: 15 servings (2/3 cup each).

A quick before and after

Please excuse the bad photography. The lighting in our house is a joke, especially in the kitchen. While that remedy is on my To Do list, I'd like to show what we most recently accomplished in our food prep room.

The curtains gracing the kitchen windows came with the house when we bought it…fifteen years ago. They were obviously custom made, a nice linen, and Dry Clean Only.

But, um, we're not a Dry Clean Only kind of people around here.

Over the years, then, the curtains got dirty dirty dirty dirty.



To replace the curtains, we opted for bamboo Roman shades. Since the multitude of kitchen cabinets are a pickled YELLOW and the new flooring waiting to be installed is a dark wood color, the bamboo shades are a deep brown as well. (Remember, the lighting in this kitchen will not always be so insipid.)



We found these blinds at Overstock.com at a most excellent price. They were way too long, but the tutorial on Landsdowne Life helped us fix that in a hurry. Now they are a perfect fit.

As for the old curtains, I saved the fabric and donated the drapery hardware to Goodwill. We'll see what use I can find for the linen...