More often than not, we decide what to make based on what we
see at the market and what ends up in our shopping bags. That is especially true of salads, which we
compose in response to what we buy rather than searching for ingredients from a
recipe. Recently we made a main dish
salad organized around the beautiful Italian salad mix from Fiddler’s Green, to
which we added julienned red cabbage (from Guevara), carrots (from Capay Fruits
and Vegetables), and red onions (from Cadena Farm) to boost the already intense
color, texture, and flavor; the miraculous winter tomatoes Towani Organic Farm
is still bringing to the market; Nicasio Valley Foggy Morning cheese; and marinated
and grilled skirt steak from Yolo Land and Cattle. This is, then, a market salad start to finish,
except for a few olives from the Co-op.

We got the idea for the marinade and dressing for this salad
from Roger Hayot’s Dinner at the
Authentic Café, the cookbook from a restaurant we loved in Los Angeles,
years ago. This is a great cookbook undermined
by a terrible design: the ingredient lists are presented in a pale lime green,
making them almost illegible. Yet this
cookbook has survived our frequent purges of our collection because, despite the bad choices of some anonymous book-designer, this one is filled with absolutely terrific recipes of all kinds. (Hayot's title is an ironic one, since his cooking is eclectic in the extreme.)

Marinade:
In a blender, whir together:
2 tablespoons heavy soy sauce
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons champagne vinegar
1 clove of garlic (peeled and roughly chopped)
1 small chile, (seeded and roughly chopped) or a generous
slug of Siracha sauce
1 tablespoon cilantro leaves
1 teaspoon agave or honey
Ground pepper
1/3 cup mild oil
Submerge the steak in the marinade and refrigerate at least
overnight. This is something you can
prep on the weekend to eat later in the week.
You can bring home your steak from the market, marinate it after it
thaws, and then leave it in the marinade for a few days until you’re ready to
cook it. Whenever you’re poking around in
the refrigerator, turn the steak so that all sides are permeated with the marinade.
When it comes time to cook the meat, we cook it in a cast
iron skillet over high heat. It is also
possible to cook it on the grill or under the broiler. Whatever you do, crank up the highest heat
you can. Skirt steak always cooks very
fast—let’s say 3-4 minutes a side. But
grassfed beef like that from the market is lower fat and it cooks even
faster. So you might want to turn it
after just 2 minutes and check it after 2 minutes on the second side.
Let the steak rest for a while (10 minutes?) before cutting
it against the grain in thin slices.
Place the still warm slices over the salad, and then
sprinkle a little of the Nicasio Valley cheese over the top.
Here’s the dressing.
Again, in a blender whir together:
½ cup balsamic vinegar
2 medium shallots, roughly chopped
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
freshly ground pepper
¼ teaspoon salt
After this is processed smooth, add, in a steady stream:
¾ cup olive oil.
The result is a thick, nicely emulsified dressing.

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