Today is a good example of prepping salad dressings and ingredients in advance. I woke up at 6:30, put a bottle of Gruet Rose’ Sauvage into the fridge to chill, and ate my usual breakfast before 8:00. I wanted to spend a leisurely lunch eating crab and salad ingredients and needed to make a dressing that would go well with both. My favorite dressing/sauce for cold crab is a mayo mignonette sauce.
Mayo/Mignonette Sauce
Mignonette sauce is shallot, vinegar, and salt and pepper.
It has a rather bitter unpleasant taste to me and Suzette, but it has one redeeming quality, which is vinegar cooked shallot. Here is the recipe: Mignonette sauce is a condiment usually made with minced shallots, cracked pepper, and vinegar. It is traditionally served with raw oysters. Wikipedia
I have eliminated the pepper and salt and have taken the core concept behind the sauce to create a sauce we like very much that goes well with both crab and as a salad dressing. It is perfect for the type of lunch we were having today, combining crab and salad ingredients.
I started by finely mincing a large shallot and covering it with about 2 T. of lemon juice to cook it. After about 10 minutes I added salt and pepper and about 2/3 cup of Mayonnaise. I the added a medium tomato diced and about ½ tsp. of fresh minced tarragon. I put this sauce into the fridge at around 9:00 to allow it to congeal a bit
At 10:15 we rode to Rio Bravo and back. I took a shower and Suzette worked on her cabinet project in the garage. Then a 11:45 I began organizing lunch. I cleaned the crab and splitting in half and placed it on the Chinese steel tray Suzette fetched. We then filled plates with assorted salad ingredients: carrot sticks, celery sticks, round of Armenian cucumber, radish wedges and wedges of a red and a yellow tomato from our garden and a couple leaves of romaine lettuce. Suzette filled the ice bucket with ice and water and placed the chilled bottle of Sauvage in the bucket. We then took everything out to the table in the garden and had a wonderful lunch. Suzette thought the Sauvage Rose’ is a little over rated but I enjoyed its clean dry taste with the crab. It has only a residual Pinot Noir flavor, so it does not interfere with the delicate crab flavor.
We filled pieces of lettuce with crab and dipped them in the sauce to make crab wraps.
After lunch I lay down for a nap and Suzette went down the alley and picked 8 ripe figs from our neighbor’s bush and the went shopping.
I was abruptly awaken at 4:38 by the noise of a lawnmower outside my window. It was Mario mowing the lawn.
I walked outside after he finished mowing and asked him to screw the wine rack Suzette had bought into the wall in the basement wine cellar. Mario fetched his drill and expertly screwed the three supports into the wall and then connected them with additional screws to the wine rack to secure it to the wall.
When Suzette came home I was emptying cases of wine and stacking bottles of wine into the four wine racks in the wine cellar. She helped me and finally after about an hour we emptied the six or seven cases of wine.
Chicken and Scallion oil Salad.
We rested a bit but at 6:30ish I started dinner.
I had seen a recipe for what appeared to be a delicious and healthy salad in Martha Stewart’s Living magazine and one for which we had all the ingredients, except the lettuce. Here is the picture and recipe:
So when I was at Costco on Saturday I bought a container of Bibb lettuce, which is Suzette’s favorite lettuce and the one used to make bowls for the salad.
We had 1 cooked chickenI breast, so I did not need to boil the chicken. I started by diced the chicken breast and placing it in a bowl with ¼ cup of sliced green onion, 3 T. of finely minced fresh ginger, and 3 T. grape seed oil and 1 T. of olive oil. Then in a separate bowl I julienned about ½ cup each of Armenian cucumber, carrot, radish and covered the vegetables with about 3 T. of rice wine vinegar. I let both bowls sit for about ½ hour so the flavors would blend and the vegetables would pickle a bit.
Suzette made two heads of Bibb lettuce into bowls by removing inner leaves. Then she hulled about 1/3 cup of roasted peanuts and fetched the cilantro. We had found a case of ginger beer in the basement and we chilled two bottles of it in the freezer to drink with dinner.
After a Suzette took a shower we assembled the salad, first chicken in the ginger scallion oil, then the pickled vegetables and some of the rice wine vinegar, and finally some crushed roasted peanuts and leaves of fresh cilantro.
It was a delicious and healthy salad an fun to not cook for a change.
The pickled vegetables
After dinner Suzette stuffed the figs with goat cheese and we poured out the last of the six grapes port that Linda and T. R. had given us.
Suzette had worked all day, so after watching Stage 4 of the Colorado Bike Race, she went to bed at 9:00 and I followed at 9:20.
Bon Appetit
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