Roasted chicken, Anasazi beans, iceberg lettuce with bleu cheese dressing

Why bleu cheese and not blue cheese? Why not fromage bleu? Why not vinaigrette au fromage bleu? Huh? 

Salmon with shrimp scampi and aerogarden herbs on iceberg

I like slabs of iceberg lettuce. 

After all that I forgot the broccoli. 

The broccoli is steamed in butter and white wine that comes in a box. 

It is a lot of butter and a lot of wine just to steam broccoli. The excess is drained into the pot that cooked the angel hair spaghetti to become the shrimp scampi sauce. The shrimp is cut into small pieces. Aerogarden trimmings, basil and sage because those two needed trimming. Plus lime, so that is a dressing right there. It drips down onto the iceberg lettuce and dresses that too. The iceberg stays sturdy and gives a very nice crunch. 

What you have here is a landscape inspired by the monolith outcroppings at Larkspur. Stratifications with patches of vegetation, the broccoli an important layer, but I forgot about that and there goes my whole landscape.

Salad with avocado, radish and sausage

At first it was all... 

And then it was all...

And then it was like...

On top of that it was all like...

And we LOLed all over the place...

Can a sausage be croutons? 

No, it cannot.

Why not?

Because crouton means crust. A crust of bread, and this is not a crust of bread, or any bread for that matter. So this must be a salad with sausage. Chorizo. Green chorizo. 

Well I'm pretending it is croutons. Salad with sausage-croutons. They're crusty.

Asian noodles, lettuce

Cold noodles in soy sauce.

* soy sauce

* rice vinegar 

* sugar

* garlic 

* ginger

* cayenne

* toasted sesame seed oil

* fish sauce

* pecans
* mint
* celery
* mayonnaise
* carrot
* Napa cabbage
* grapes

Potato salad, iceberg lettuce

Sliced through and microwaved to dry it out then cut completely open before it can glue itself back together.

Pacific salmon with skin, iceberg lettuce, red bell pepper, dressing, lemon

*whispers* It wasn't very good. What went wrong? Shhh shhh shhh.  The salmon. Overcooked. 

Flatiron, iceberg lettuce quarter, blue cheese dressing, refried beans, tortillas

I concluded Emilene's blue cheese dressing is blue cheese + buttermilk. My friend said he used to make it and they used mayonnaise too. My mayonnaise has a lot of mustard and garlic so I included it. It was excellent.  I did not use the cream cheese pictured because when I opened the package I saw I'd have to trim it heavily and I didn't feel like it, plus it would have diluted the flavor anyway without adding anything significant. So I tossed it. 

This is one of my favorite new things. If you ever see flatiron cut in your grocer's cooler, just toss it in your basket. You won't regret it. The thing is, the dry rub is entirely extemporaneous so it never tastes quite the same any two times, and that is the glory and the power you wield as extemporaneous cook. Anything less, and you are slave to proven recipe. 

Tortillas were made with regular masa harina (powdered alkaline-treated corn meal) and pressed in a common cast-aluminum press, heated in a hot pan for seconds, as much time as it takes to press the next tortilla. One cup hot water + 1 and 3/4 cup masa harina = 13 small tortillas. 

Iceberg lettuce quarter

Loser lettuce. All dressed up and no place to go. Except mah stuuuuh-mik. Devoid of nutrients but full of crunch and healthful live microflora.

Dressing is:

• Olive oil in a bowl

• Dijon mustard, a daub plopped in the bowl. Do not lick the spoon, you'll need it.

• Raspberry preserves, another daub plopped in the bowl

• Croutons made from homemade bread. Fried in a pan with gobs of olive oil and powdered garlic.

• Shaved Parmigiano.

• A tablespoon of prepared kimchi to the side.

• Hothouse tomato. The package said it was a hothouse but for all I know it could have been a warm house.

• Brittany gray sea salt, so exceedingly high in minerals you can taste 'em in there.

Iceberg lettuce

I haven't bought an iceberg lettuce since ... um ... ever. This is the lettuce I grew up with. My mum, bless her, put together the most depressingly unimaginative salads you ever saw. This lettuce, discs of sliced tomato, discs of sliced cucumber. That's it. Bottled salad dressings were kept in the refrigerator door. Setting the table in preparation for dinner meal involved grabbing all the bottles of salad dressing at once and carrying them by their necks clanging together like glass bells to the table. Everybody had their personal choice of dressing.

Then I forgot all about those childish ways.

Much later at a dinner party at a friend's house they did that -- collect a bunch of prepared bottled commercial dressings by their necks and brought them clanging to the table. I burst out laughing. "What's so funny?" Caught off guard, embarrassed, I couldn't answer. But it's still funny.

Now Althouse linked a story posted on NYT online by Mark Bittman, The Charms of the Loser Lettuces that included an attractive photo of iceberg. It looked great. Within the comments to the post on Althouse a member commenter, Paul, wrote sagely:

The reason Iceberg lettuce is such a good choice, in spite of being derided for a lack of nutrients in recent years, is that it is rich in intestinal flora and an aid to digestion. One more piece of traditional wisdom, albeit a small one, that the lefty boomers in their juvenile desire to remake and improve society tossed aside.