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I don’t eat a lot of salads. In order for me to enjoy a salad, it has to have lots of good stuff in it. I can’t stand the thought of eating a plate of lettuce with some vinegar and oil on it with a stray cucumber here and there.

However, when you start adding things like grilled flank steak to a salad, I am interested. And this salad was really good. The steak is marinated in a mixture of lime juice, soy sauce, canola oil, brown sugar, garlic, ginger, and red curry paste or chili garlic sauce. Yum!!! I was really impressed with this marinade and will definitely use it again.

For the salad part of this salad I used a spring greens mix and then added sliced shallots, basil, and some shaved parmigianno cheese for garnish. When you make the marinade the recipe says to reserve about half as a salad dressing. We thought we may not have enough dressing left over so I added some more lime juice, and that really mellowed out the dressing a little and it gave the salad a wonderful light flavor.

This was an awesome Craving Ellie in My Belly pick by Jen B.. You can find the recipe for this salad at the Food Network or on page 107 of The Food you Crave by Elie Krieger.

(Look at how perfectly my fabulous boyfriend grilled the steak while I was on my way home from a late night at work):

This week’s Craving Ellie in my Belly was a cobb salad and was chosen by Gabi over at The Feast Within.

As a rule, I don’t really like salads unless they are terrible for you. Case in point: my favorite salad is Caesar salad, and I also used to love the BBQ steak salad at J. Paul’s. However, I actually really like cobb salad and used to eat it all the time at this place called Chadwick’s (also in Georgetown).

So I was happy to try out Ellie’s lightened up version over the weekend. Nick was out of town, so I was on my own and decided to make this as a nice light lunch. I picked up a rotisserie chicken from the store instead of baking up some breasts. I also left out the blue cheese (YUCK!), and the tomatoes (ALSO YUCK!), and the hard boiled egg (YUM, but I was being lazy). So I figured since I was leaving out the cheese and the egg, I could substitute the ham for a couple slices of bacon. And can you believe that Whole Foods was out of romaine hearts by 11AM on Saturday morning! I ended up buying a bagged romaine mix, which was not nearly as good as some regular romaine hearts. So I suppose this wasn’t exactly a cobb salad, but it was a delicious salad. The dressing was also pretty good even though it was a 1:1 ratio of oil to acid as opposed to the standard 2:1 ratio.

I fully enjoyed this and I think I will make it again when I can get some good romaine and put in the time to hard boil the egg and serve it more like a cobb salad should be served. I was being lazy and just threw everything in a bowl and tossed it. Hence why my picture just looks like a bowl of lettuce. Though I assure you there is other good stuff in there that wound up in my belly. I have no doubt that my fellow Craving Ellie ladies did a much better job actually following the recipe and serving this in a much more attractive way.

I was not introduced to real barbecue until a few short years ago. I think the first true pork bbq sandwich I ever had was on my first trip the the Outer Banks in North Carolina. Truth be told, I was not that impressed. I think it was the ridonculously vinegary sauce. I love a sweet and tangy BBQ sauce, but whatever I had was not enough sweet and too much tang.

Anyway, last year, Nick decided that it would be a good idea to build a smoker. Needless to say, we had many months of great summer BBQ’s with a variety of smoked foods, including multiple pork butts. So this is what really ignited and cemented my love of smoked food and true barbecue.

Unfortunately, pork butt is not a lean cut of meat. In fact, part of the reason why the pulled pork is so good is because slow cooking it upwards of 10 hours allows all the fat to melt into the meat, making it extra tender and flavorful. So when I saw Ellie Krieger make some delicious looking pulled BBQ chicken sandwiches I knew I had give them a try. Could I satiate my cravings for good barbecue in a healthy way. Barbecue purists would say no, but I say yes.

Ellie uses a store bought rotisserie chicken and a quick homemade barbecue sauce. I added some homemade coleslaw to them and served them on some homemade rolls. This was unbelievably good. They can’t compete with a real pulled pork sandwich, but they are a great easy weeknight healthy alternative. I will be making these again and again.

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Have you ever had Kobe beef? The real deal, straight from Japan, beer drinking, Sake massaged KOBE BEEF? If you answered “yes” to this question, you’ll have no problem with this one:

“If someone is giving me $250 to create a fabulous meal from starting ingredients of my choice, what should I make?”

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I have a confession to make. I don’t enjoy cooking fish. My confidence in the kitchen is at its lowest when I am cooking fish. Now, this does not include shellfish. We eat A LOT of shellfish, so I have become very comfortable handling it. However, hand me a piece of fish, and I will immediately have visions of how I am going to ruin it.

I have a few basic fish recipes that I can execute well, but besides that I am always worried that it is going to fall apart or that I am going to under cook it and that usually leads to over cooking. A few months ago I even bought myself a copy of Fish Without a Doubt: The Cook’s Essential Companion by Rick Moonen, Roy Finamore. I have only made one or two things from it, that were not all that great, so it sits on my book shelf under utilized.

Lately, I have been making more fish in an effort to eat healthier, so I am working on my fish issues. When I saw this recipe for baked cod on Serious Eats I was actually excited to make it! It is baked which is my preferred method to make fish, and includes some great Sicilian flavor combinations. The recipe is by Gina DiPalma who is the pastry chef at Mario Batali’s (and Joseph Bastianich’s) Babbo.

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I’m going to get this out of the way immediately: this salad is like a child to me. It is far and away one of my favorite things to both prepare and eat. The idea for this salad came from a truly uninspired trip to the grocery store. As you may have guessed, I rarely plan out a meal before I head to the market to see what is available. I usually end up wandering around the market and create a meal based on what looks the best, freshest or just catches my eye. This salad was a spawn of one of those adventures.

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This week’s CEiMB was Buffalo Chicken Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing and was chosen by the lovely Andrea of You Eat Now.

All sources say that this was totally delicious and wonderful. Unfortunately for me, I really hate blue cheese (Yuck - it’s moldy!) and hot foods. However, Nick and our co-blogger and good friend Geoff love both blue cheese and hot things. So I made this for them and did not have one bite of it.

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I am not a big salad eater. I think it is partially because cleaning and chopping lettuce is one of my least favorite things to do in the kitchen. However, I always enjoy a good Caesar salad.

We have been making the Caesar salad recipe in this post for years. We found the original on Cooks.com after Nick’s dad lost “the steak book” which contained a great recipe that he had been using.

The original recipe has been adapted over time to fit our tastes. I think it makes one of the best, if not the best, Caesar salad I have ever had. Geoff recently said that the one thing he hates about this dressing is that it ruins all other Caesar dressings for him. It has a great spiciness from the garlic with just a hint of anchovy and a light yet creamy texture from the cheese and coddled egg. The homemade croutons, which are a Nick original, really round out the salad nicely (and yes Greg, Nick is a master of toast in many forms).

There are different schools of thought on how a Caesar salad dressing should be made, and if you are interested in reading about them and the origin of Caesar salad, you should check out Nick’s article here.

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