green salad, Asian dressing

Where sauce = dressing.

I've been making this dressing, or some version of it, ever since I was a little bitty bouncing boy … twenty-one years of age. Hey, I was a waif, ah-ite?

I couldn't be arsked to measure anything because, numbers, eh, they're not my bag, Man. But if I would break down and measure sometime, say in my dotage carefully reading along scripted instruction, it would turn out like this:

There was about half the dressing remaining in the bowl after I tossed the salad. So this makes an excess for one decent sized salad, and by decent I mean huge, and by huge I mean huge for one person not huge for ten people.

I LOVE those red peppers burnt in a pan. Done in strips with a little oil, it's no problem at all. Takes only a minute. Do not peel, leave the black on for FLAVAH!

As a kid I would have rejected that idea. Burnt, ick. But now as a Western chile-eat'n guy I'm totally cool with it. You have to hand it to those Central Americans and Southwestern EE.UU. Americans, they sure do know how to handle chile peppers and not just the hot ones. This is best done on an open fire but that technique is discouraged by city ordinance and the apartment lease agreement where I live downtown.

The same pan and oil can be used to put a singe on the courgette, zucchini if you like. I prefer to roll it while I'm cutting so the discs come out at irregular angles and with areas of uneven thicknesses on each disc. That is so cool! The result is a tossed and tumbled carefree cut that is thoughtfully achieved.

Speaking of cuts, I lost a chef's knife. Now I ask you, how does one lose an 8" chef's knife? This confounds me completely. Today Melody and I looked e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e for it, even in illogical places. Finally Melody concluded it was accidentally thrown away, and I must say, it's beginning to seem like that must have been what happened. So I bought another one. A much better one.

Oh, I forgot to mention. Cilantro and mint again. That is one great combination there, so great I enhanced it further with double the amount of basil. So the greens in this salad are bib lettuce, I think it's bib, kind of thick for bib, and all those herbs. It's so aromatic you get high just smelling it. Okay, that's a lie, you don't get high, but you do get a lot sweeter. I feel so perfumy with minty-fresh breath. That's my one super power -- minty fresh breath.