Avocado Salad

I actually got the recipe for avocado salad from my boss. She was eating it at work one day and it looked really good so I asked her about it. She told me she had it at a restaurant and it was so good she went home and recreated it. It's super simple but amazingly delicious. You can make a single serving for a light lunch or several servings as an appetizer for a get-together.

Avocado Salad

Makes: 1 serving

1 ripe avocado

3 - 4 paper thin slices of red onion

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp lime juice

pinch sea salt

• Cut the avocado in half and remove the pit. Cut each half into slices, then scoop them out of the shell. Place the slices in a glass bowl.
• Add the onion, olive oil, lime juice, and sea salt. Gently fold it all together with a spoon or rubber spatula.
• Serve on a bed of baby spinach, with some tortilla chips, or with a warm flour tortilla.

Spinach Salad with Grapefruit Dressing

This is THE BEST salad you will ever have in your life! I cannot get enough of it. I know that the combination of spinach and grapefruit sounds a little weird. But trust me, it's amazing. I'm not a big fan of grapefruit, it's a little too tart for my tastes. But on this salad, it compliments all of the other ingredients so well. Try it!!!

Spinach Salad with Grapefruit Dressing
Makes: 1 serving

Salad:
2 big handfuls of baby spinach
2 tbsp walnuts
2 tbsp crumbled blue cheese
1 large pink grape fruit, cut into segments

Dressing:
1/4 cup cranberry juice
1/4 cup pink grapefruit juice
1/2 cup olive oil
2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 shallot, finely minced

• First make the dressing. Whisk together the cranberry juice, grapefruit juice, olive oil, sugar, salt, and shallot. If you've never used shallots before, they look a little bit like a really small onion and they have a very mild onion flavor. Sometimes they're sold in bulk or they might be sold in a little mesh bag of four or five. This is what they look like:

•  Once the dressing is made, set it aside.
• Now toast the walnuts. Place them in a dry pan over medium heat. Swirl them around in the pan until they start to brown and become fragrant. Remove from the heat.
• Assemble the salad. Start with a bed of the spinach; top it with the toasted walnuts, blue cheese, and grapefruit segments.
• Drizzle the salad dressing over the salad. The leftover dressing can be kept in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.

Ok, time for some science. When making a vinaigrette like the one above, you're creating an emulsion. An emulsion is a suspension of one liquid in another - in the case of salad dressing, that would be the suspension of the vinegar in the oil. When creating an emulsion, it helps to have emulsifiers - that is something that helps the suspension stay together. With bottled salad dressing, you will usually see xanthan gum in there as the emulsifier. However, you can also use any kind of chopped vegetables as an emulsifier (hence all the little bits of veggies that you see floating in Italian dressing). With our grapefruit vinaigrette, the minced shallot acts as the emulsifier, helping the dressing stay together. The more you know!