"Better than a Cobb" Shallot and Asparagus Steak Salad

I started to get a lot of hits off of the term, "Asparagus Salad". I should qualify that statement. I started to get a lot of hits for an asparagus blog off the term Asparagus Salad. If you Yahoo! search Asparagus Salad my asparagus salad comes up in the pictures. My blog isn't mentioned. It's just the picture. It's a great picture done by a lovely photographer that does a lot of pro bono work for me out of pity. I don't really know who even uses Yahoo! as a search engine. Does Alta Vista sometimes get too bogged down with traffic? Having seen that and wanting to respond to a vague sense of what my audience (I use this term really loosely) would want, I set out to make the best asparagus salad I could. This is what I came up with, and honestly I think it's better than a Cobb.

Here's the long name:

Steak salad with blanched asparagus, grilled shallots, avocado, cherry tomato, crumbled blue cheese, and a fried egg.

Or for short: S.S.B.A.G.S.A.C.T.C.B.C.F.E. (This is how you will affectionately order it at Chili's when they buy the recipe from me)

Ingredients:

Mixed greens

Blanched asparagus

1 grilled shallot

Crumbled blue cheese

1/2 of an avocado

Cherry tomatoes

Grilled steak

1/3 cup olive oil

3 tablespoons of Grey Poupon

Red wine vinegar to taste

Salt

Pepper

1 fried egg per serving

Instructions:

I've previously talked about blanching asparagus, and I more recently talked about grilling steak. For the salad dressing in this all you need to do is put 1/3 of a cup of olive oil in a small bowl. Add your mustard and your red wine vinegar. Whisk it all until the mustard makes it emulsify. Add salt, pepper, and additional oil, mustard, or vinegar to taste. It's a fickle process and you're going to have to do taste tests until it's to your liking. I had most of my salad assembled as I was grilling my steak. When I say assembled what I mean is I just took the ingredients and I put them on a plate. What's nice about this recipe is that timing isn't a factor. A lot of the stressful element of cooking is derived from trying to cook several different things that cook at different rates and having them all ready at the same time. Friend, this is a salad. There's no need for any of that. When the steak is done let it rest and cool. I had everything sliced, chopped and plated and then I just fried an egg with ease for the final garnish. It made a hearty dinner that was easy and delicious.

Shallot and Blanched Asparagus Salad

This is a really easy salad recipe. I'm unsure if recipe is the accurate word when you're talking about salads. It's more of a guideline. You can follow this exactly or follow your whims. I will be truly impressed if you can screw up a salad.


Ingredients:

Lettuce
Blanched Asparagus
Shallots
Sun dried tomatoes
Red bell pepper
Salt and Pepper to taste
Olive oil






There's a long-standing philosophical debate that divides salad culture regarding the basic preparation of salads. I think it even predates Socrates. He didn't have the audacity to get involved with this heated discussion and I will take his cowardly example. Whether you want to have all of the ingredients prepped and ready before you start to embark upon your creation or if you want to start with some ingredients in the bowl and simply add to your conglomeration of ingredients is up to you entirely. Each technique speaks volumes about you as a person and I refuse to weigh in to either side of the argument. You either make salads like Camus or you make salad like Kant. You will be judged accordingly.

Tips:


For this salad I used the olive oil that was in the jar of sun dried tomatoes I had for a light salad dressing. When you do that a few times you can just add more olive oil to your jar and let it get infused with the sun dried tomatoes.



Instructions:

Take the aforementioned ingredients and put them in a bowl. Once all the ingredients are in the bowl you should drizzle the olive oil over the top of it all.