Zest

Here's an idea.  Suppose you're in a groove, making the same basic salad but you're looking for something a little different.  You're thinking that you've got a good thing going, but you want to make a few adjustments to get that salad up on its feet.  Well, one way to goose up a salad is to add some lemon zest.  

Zest is the oil-rich outer rind of the lemon but only the portion with color, not the white pith. It is scraped off with a paring knife or a zester, and it imparts a very intense lemon/citrus flavor to the your salad.  Interestingly, it works with many salad combinations, and you can use it as sparingly or as liberally as you want to provide that extra bit of flavor.  You can buy dried zest, but zesting a lemon is really fun, it gives you a good excuse to buy a zester, and you have a bunch of bald lemons to use for other purposes. 

The house salad

Across from the Vancouver Museum of Art, there is a little nondescript bistro called The Bellagio. Unlike its over-the-top cousin in Las Vegas, you could walk past this little establishment and not have any sense of the greatness that awaits you inside. On a rainy afternoon, in late December, we happened into this place and ordered lunch. Truthfully speaking, we don't remember the entrees that we ordered.  The true revelation was the house salad. It was magnificent. There wasn't very much to it -- mostly just spring mix -- but the dressing was simply unbelievable. We made such a fuss over it that our unflappable waitress asked the chef to write it down for us. The ingredients are:

• Olive oil
• Fresh-squeezed lemon juice
• Basil
• Salt
• Pepper
• A splash of balsamic vinegar

Since that day, we have been wrestling with the proportions of these ingredients with the passion of medieval alchemists, trying to recreate that salad. It was light, flavorful, and it seemed to invite you into the garden from which all good things come. We have yet to make that exact salad, but every attempt at it is a revelation in itself.