Salad with roasted red bell pepper, meat ball

This would be excellent for a light dinner party. A simple salad with two things in it with lettuce, homemade honey/mustard vinaigrette, and a smaller plate with a meatball and toasted bread with an insignificant pile of angel hair spaghetti. So reversed from the usual arrangement of entree and salad. 

The handmade dressing is easy as opening a bottle of prepared dressing, times four. 

In my case easier than that even because my olive oil and my rice vinegar have pour spouts not screw on tops.

* olive oil, the larger ring

* rice vinegar, light and nearly sweet, the ring inside the oil ring

* honey, splotch next to the mustard

* mustard, homemade from powder the best because it add so much that regular prepared mustard does not, but if not, then not to worry, prepared mustard is fine

* salt and pepper but that doesn't count for opening things

This avocado is soft and now it's protected from oxygen and can sit there without going dark.

These red bell peppers are sitting in hot oil and salted. Situated so a flat surface of each piece is touching the pan and they're left alone to burn slightly on one side. 

Red bell pepper strips are good by themselves as a side, they're wonderful that way, blackened in spots and heated through, oiled and salted, with a few drops of vinegar or lemon and they're even better.

The salad can hold like this until service. Vegetables protected in dressing and the delicate lettuce on top protected from dressing. 

The meatball is incidental but delicious, unauthentic but better than you'll get outside, fast and careless but satisfying as languidly marinated Old World approach. It's a meat loaf in miniature, larger than a golf ball, a meal.

A guest made the meatballs by my instructions while I made the salad and toast. 

The sauce is quite fast from spices in oil, tomato paste, and tinned tomato.

This meal is tested with other people twice and they both raved.

Both times the guests effused over the dressing, which is remarkably simple to pull off, so one is given undeserved credit for discovering something that's already in plain sight.

Win. 

Farfalla salad

Does this look good? The inner food stylist says it needs color, like doink doink or maybe doink doink doink, and the outer photographer concurs. The whole pale on pale thing isn't working. So what. It is wot I made then ate and it is delicious.

Here is the dressing that is awesome-opossum. It is a complicated honey/mustard dressing, produced by a few unforgiving steps requiring the good solid judgement of a four year old. It is started with a teaspoon of mustard in a little bowl. 

My favorite mustard is my own made from the powder sold in tins at the grocery found with all the other spices. If I see seeds then I buy those too. I looked for the cheapest kind of powder. It's all the same source, basically, Canada and Northern U.S. states. I bought six tins for 6 X the fun. One tablespoon white vinegar for one small tin of mustard powder 1.4 oz tin, I think. The vinegar activates the powder and the rest is water to the desired paste, thick or thin. Ta daa. 

The whole mustard thing has turned out to be extraordinary. I keep mentioning this because other people respond to it more strongly than I do. I was surprised how good it is, but other people go nuts and that surprises me more. So I also bought little jars for them that I can give away mustard with pretzels and the like, they're the cutest little things. 

For the dressing then, some of that mustard is put into a small bowl with an equal amount of honey, loosened with white vinegar, about a teaspoon to two teaspoons and enough vegetable oil to suit the whole amount going on there. That's it. No salt or pepper and no other spices.

The cheese is called butterkäse, aptly if unimaginatively named buttery cheese that is mild, smooth, and pleasant.