Layered Breakfast Salad

Breakfast Salad, originally uploaded by michele wynne.

I really do love salads yet I rarely make them. By the time I've collected up my favorite salad components, rinsed, dried and chopped, sliced and slivered...well...it just seems like an awful lot of work when all is said and done for something that is essentially a side dish. It's kind of like exercising...I'll make every excuse not to do it, but once I've convinced myself to start I really enjoy it, even though more often than not, once I've enjoyed the first salad or two, I still end up with a lot of sad produce that I just can't manage to use up.

 

I am newly inspired by a couple of things:

 

1) Little Gems and Baby Heads!  Small heads of lettuce that are perfect for the single serving salad. I love, love, love the crunchy Little Gems. I'd never seen these before I started working at Bi-Rite.

2) Layered rather than tossed salads-I've taken a couple of cooking classes at 18 Reasons, Bi-Rite's non-profit educational space. The gal who runs the program and teaches many of the classes always builds the salad on platters. Each component is prepped and spread on the plate or platter in two layers and generally consists of no more than 4-5 components including the dressing, which is also drizzled on within the layers. 

3) Gifts from the Grey Box: The salad pictured above started with my culled collection of 3 Little Gems, one Baby Head, one heirloom tomato, a bunch of radishes (sliced paper thin on a mandolin), a red bell pepper (sliced in thin strips) and a handful of romano beans (sliced thinly on the diagonal). Lastly, some slivered basil.

 

My go to dressing is a honey Dijon vinaigrette:

1/3 cup Olive Oil

2 tablespoons of lemon juice

1 clove garlic finely minced and smashed

1 tablespoon Dijon

1 teaspoon honey or agave nectar

a pinch of salt

a couple of grinds of fresh pepper
1 thinly sliced scallion

 

I put all the dressing components into a small jam jar and shake it like crazy to emulsify.

 

The  dinner salad was topped with a little of my new favorite cheese, L'Amuse Gouda. The eggs were added to the next-day breakfast leftovers which held up surprisingly well. What I didn't use the night before, when I started layering on my salad plate, I put into a plastic sandwich container, keeping each component in it's own little pile within the single container.

The only thing missing is bacon!

Update: I just found this article as I was looking up the Little Gem. It includes and interview with Simon, our produce buyer at Bi-Rite.