Smokey corn and cabbage salad
Often when I cook I start out with a vague idea of where I want the meal to end up…no not in my belly silly…I mean how it will taste and what it will look like. On Monday I cooked six ears of corn knowing that we wouldn’t eat them all but that I could use them in a salad on Tuesday night. So I actually started thinking about Tuesday night’s dinner while I was making Monday’s dinner.
On Tuesday I planned to fritter away the whole day learning some new applications on my adorable new laptop. Isn’t it cute…I’ve covered it with my moo picture stickers…oh such a delight! It’s powered by Linux…specfically the Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn distribution. I’m now a huge fan of Linux and the whole learning curve has been painless thanks to the sweet, sweet GH. Open source rules!!!
Back to the food…I managed to tear myself away from Lappy (yes I named my laptop) long enough to get some pork chops out of the freezer to defrost. Later, I dug through the freezer again and found a jar labeled “spicy marinade” and felt resonably confident that it would go well with pork…doesn’t everything. While I pulled a double espresso I defrosted the marinade in the microwave and plunked the chops into it for a soak.
At six I headed into the kitchen and began putting dinner together. In the refrigerator was a red bell pepper, cabbage, a purple onion, the corn plus there were three tomatoes on the counter. I roasted the bell pepper over the flame on my cooktop as I chopped the cabbage, sliced the corn off the cob, and diced the onion and tomatoes. This all got thrown into a large bowl. Once the pepper was roasted I removed the loose charred skin and seeds, diced it, and added it to the bowl. In a mixing cup I combined 2 minced cloves of garlic, 1/3 cup lime juice, and 1/3 cup olive. I always keep bottles of Santa Cruz lime and lemon juice in the refrigerator…they work so well in marinades and dressings. I stirred that up well and added a teaspoon of Spanish smoked paprika and a 1/4 teaspoon of chilpotle. Once that was well combined I tossed the salad. The pork chops were on and off the grill in no time at all and dinner was served.
The salad worked so well with the pork chops. The smoky spicy flavors of the paprika and chipotle played accented the sweetness of the roasted pepper and corn. The cabbage might seem like an odd addition but it really was pleasant. The acidity of the lime juice boosted the flavors. My favorite was a small bite of pork with some salad on the fork too. Perfect easy summer dinner.
For those of you that like a recipe click for the printer-friendly version.
Finally, a brief aside about this blog. Over the summer I’ve been tweaking the design and layout. I upgraded WP and my theme to the most current releases. I’ve got my fabulous, colorful banner and I’ve resigned myself to tolerating the small photo size (I’m at 461px on the width and I lust after 580px). I removed all ads because, well really…they’re never going to actually pay enough to balance out their inherent ugliness. I’ve cleaned up the sidebar and added a few flickr mosiacs…hopefully they don’t slow the loading speed down too much. Today I added a new “related posts” feature at the bottom of each post. I hope it behaves and serves us well but if not I’ll bring it in line or kick it out. If you have any comments or suggestions please let me know. Thanks for reading!
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The carnitas look awesome will have to try soon, love all Spanish food recipes.