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Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Warm Spinach Salad



Warm Spinach Salad

I drew inspiration once again from Wolfgang Puck's cookbook How To Eat. This salad isn't out of this world. Could the omission of goat cheese have made all of the difference? Goat cheese isn't something that my home kitchen readily has on hand. So, I substituted brick cheese. The basic idea of the recipe goes something like this. My adaptation.


Fry bacon
(hey fry the whole pound, bag it, put it in the fridge for your next recipe)
Remove almost all of the bacon fat from the frying pan. To which you will add onion slices. Cook the onion until caramalized, add garlic, sundried tomatoes, balsamic, red wine vinegar, and olive oil. Using the vinegar to deglaze the pan before the addition of the oil. Cook just to heat.

Pile the spinach on your serving platter. Sprinkle with cheese crumbles and bacon. Remove the onions from the pan and place ever so pretty on the salad. Drizzle the warm dressing over the platter of salad.

Also, I took Chef Puck up on his suggestion to add hard boiled eggs.
Maybe I am just disgruntled because my home kitchen did not reveal a masterpiece of Chef Puck's French Bread recipe.

This recipe was just okay.

What I consider to be highlights of the cookbook are

Great photography ( the work of Ron Manville)
Nice suggestions on each page entitled Wolfgang's Easy Tips
Quick, easy, thumb through reading
I will say this though, for a regular retail price of $34.99, I did not find anything outstanding. I only paid $6.99 so I guess I got my monies worth.

The book will sit on my shelf, and eventually another recipe will be tried. For now, Nigella awaits.



2 comments:

  1. Do you have any idea how rare brick cheese is in this part of the country? I haven't seen that stuff since I left Illinois something like 20 years ago. My son thinks it is some sort of mythological cheese that exists only in my imagination.

    That has to be a million times better than goat cheese.

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  2. I had no idea that Brick cheese had limited availability. A local food market had a deal on the cheese. Five 6 oz. blocks for $5.00.

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