Year In Pictures: 2010/03/28
Mar. 28th, 2010 03:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plonqIt was rustle up your own lunch day at the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
plonq and atara household again today, so it seemed like a good excuse to put salad on the menu again. We had some leftover ingredients from salads that atara made last week, so I decided to use those salads as a base and experiment a bit.
The salads that we had last week were lettuce, chicken, blue cheese and crumbled bacon with a poached egg on top, served with a Dijon mustard vinaigrette. They were good, but between the dressing and the blue cheese they were a bit too tart, and sharp on the tongue. I started with the same base salad, and then added sliced pear and a sprinkling of dried cranberries to offset the blue cheese. If I had thought about it early enough, I'd have gotten fancy and poached the pear first so that I could garnish the salad with the pear halves, but the raw pear slices worked out nicely.
For the dressing I started with three parts olive oil to one part red-wine vinegar. I added a bit of honey to serve as both a flavouring agent and an emulsifier, then I added some Dijon mustard, minced garlic, and a pinch of kosher salt. The honey, pears and cranberries served as a good counter-balance to the blue cheese, mustard and vinegar and I dare say this was a very agreeable salad.
The lighting was not ideal for this picture, but I did not want to take too much time setting up a good shot with the tripod because the eggs were getting cold. I snapped this one at 1/45th of a second with an aperture of f/2.4. I had to do a fair bit of colour-balancing to get it to look about right, and I sharpened it a bit. The original shot was also very slightly under-exposed, so I had to push the exposure. Finally I added a vignette effect to make the salad jump out a bit more.
plonq and atara household again today, so it seemed like a good excuse to put salad on the menu again. We had some leftover ingredients from salads that atara made last week, so I decided to use those salads as a base and experiment a bit.The salads that we had last week were lettuce, chicken, blue cheese and crumbled bacon with a poached egg on top, served with a Dijon mustard vinaigrette. They were good, but between the dressing and the blue cheese they were a bit too tart, and sharp on the tongue. I started with the same base salad, and then added sliced pear and a sprinkling of dried cranberries to offset the blue cheese. If I had thought about it early enough, I'd have gotten fancy and poached the pear first so that I could garnish the salad with the pear halves, but the raw pear slices worked out nicely.
For the dressing I started with three parts olive oil to one part red-wine vinegar. I added a bit of honey to serve as both a flavouring agent and an emulsifier, then I added some Dijon mustard, minced garlic, and a pinch of kosher salt. The honey, pears and cranberries served as a good counter-balance to the blue cheese, mustard and vinegar and I dare say this was a very agreeable salad.
The lighting was not ideal for this picture, but I did not want to take too much time setting up a good shot with the tripod because the eggs were getting cold. I snapped this one at 1/45th of a second with an aperture of f/2.4. I had to do a fair bit of colour-balancing to get it to look about right, and I sharpened it a bit. The original shot was also very slightly under-exposed, so I had to push the exposure. Finally I added a vignette effect to make the salad jump out a bit more.
