The Homework Salads

Last week I asked readers to follow in the footsteps of my radicchio and napa cabbage pairing, using something out of the ordinary in a salad of their own. The clear winners were Seth D. Michaels and Sean Mcleod, because their creations fit the bill, and because they were the only ones to respond.

The god-awful photo above was taken with Seth D.'s cell phone camera, and I have included it not because I like it, but because I want to publicly humiliate him by making his lack of skill known. Hopefully this will shame him into taking a better picture for future submissions. Regardless, here is his unusual salad:

I cut up garlic and onions, and cooked both in sesame oil. I then cut a slightly-smaller-than-fist-sized block of tofu into squares, and fried it in the oil I already had going. While it was frying, I tossed in some crushed red pepper.

I fried it kind of hard on both sides. At some point, I threw in a few sesame seeds. At the stage depicted in the photo, I added a little soy sauce and rice vinegar, then a handful of spinach and green onion. Finally, I added about half a cup of noodles, which I tossed around with a little more soy sauce. Once plated, I put basil leaves atop the whole thing.

The spinach shrunk more than I thought it would, making it less salad-y and more stir-fry-y. In the end it looked like the attached photo, but less blurry.

I'd say the most unusual thing about this salad is that it wasn't a salad, but it does sound good. Here's Mcleod's take:

Salad is one of those things that I always think that I want to eat more of, though I usually end up cooking a vegetable instead. I buy romaine or arugula every week, and I only think to make salad when I peer into the vegetable drawer and say to myself, "Better use that while it's still good."

Last night's dinner included a spinach salad from a bag of still-edible baby spinach along with a head of endive, cold roasted beets unused from Thanksgiving, and hakurei turnips thinly sliced (also bought for Thxgiving).

The secret ingredient was pomegranate seeds, which were like beautiful jewels mixed into the greens. Served a simple dijon vinaigrette, I put out one of the simplest dinners I've done on a Sunday in a long time: rotisserie chicken, microwaved spaghetti squash (dressed with the same vinaigrette), and the aforementioned salad.

The most striking component of this salad is the harukei turnip, which neither I nor google image search have heard of.

Thanks to all those (two) who contributed, and happy weird salads to everyone else.