Awesome Salad

I made an awesome salad for dinner last night. It was awesome. I've been trying to branch beyond the standard lettuce, tomato and cucumber salad. Especially since tomatoes and cucumbers are not in season now. And I'm kind of on a goat cheese kick right now, too.

It was a grilled chicken salad with a homemade raspberry vinaigrette dressing.

For the Salad:

Red Leaf Lettuce

Endive

Goat Cheese

Bit-sized pieces of Navel Oranges

For the chicken, I do what I normally do, which is stand in front of the spice rack and pick spices and herbs that give the taste I'm looking for. I was looking for a sweet flavor profile, with hints of licorice and that fresh, clean celery/parsley aftertaste that would be a nice complement to the oranges and goat cheese. I took dried tarragon, fennel seed, a bit of celery seed and some cumin and a bit of salt and ground them together with the mortar and pestle and then just sprinkled it on the chicken, which I then broiled. You could grill it, but it was raining and I wasn't in a grilling-in-the-rain sort of mood.

The chicken was very, very tasty.

I served the chicken on a bed of the salad and then sprinkled crushed-up candied pecans over the salad and chicken, then drizzled on the dressing. (No, I didn't do my own pecans, I just bought some.)

For the Dressing (I got most of this recipe from allrecipes.com, but made a few changes with the amounts, less sugar than they called for, for one)

1/2 cup raspberry vinegar (found it at my regular grocery store)

1/2 cup olive oil (not EVOO, just regular)

1/4 cup sugar

1/2 tsp. dijon mustard

pepper

First you heat the vinegar and sugar together to dissolve the sugar. Then let it cool a bit and put it in a tightly-lidded container along with the other ingredients, and shake. I like to use a canning jar. I keep a used canning lid on hand for this use. I just wash it like any other lid and while I wouldn't try to seal a jar of food with it, it does a good job of not leaking when you're shaking stuff in it.

Next time I think I'll put some mint in the dressing and see what it's like. I used less sugar than the recipe called for, and thought it was plenty sweet. You could probably put even less. It also called for more oil, but I thought 1/2 cup was enough. This dressing was very light and very tasty. Nice intense raspberry flavor, and was fabulous on the chicken. I think it will be wonderful on a fruit salad in the summer. I liked that the recipe didn't call for preserves, which are just too sweet and need straining.

Anyway, that's my awesome salad. John and Squig and I loved it, Sam ate most of his and Ruby didn't like the endive and wouldn't eat the rest of the salad because it was in there with the endive. She loved the chicken, though. She's 6 years old and picky, so we'll forgive her.