We will talk salads in a minute, but first a picture from the Lady Antebellum concert I attended last night with Becca.
Since Becca is a working mommy, it’s rare that we have a night to ourselves to have enjoy some drinks and good food and take in some quality country music. We’re both huge country fans, so you can rest assured we were rockin’ out the entire night in our cowboy boots, just like back in the glory days of high school.
Lady A. was amazing, and the opening act, Kip Moore, well, he is part of the reason country music has started to appeal to the masses…masses of young women that is.
(Here he is belting out Landslide with Lady Antebellum and Kacey Musgraves. He is the one in the plaid cut-off…it takes a real country man to pull that off!
A nice ol’ country boy from Georgia with that slow Southern drawl, grit in his voice and a twinkle in his eye. The modern day cowboy crooning about “young love” and a pretty girl that he wants to take home ’cause his “momma’s gonna love” her. As the Dixie Chicks say “cowboy take me away!” Ah, yes, a girl can dream.
(For the record, he was kind enough to sign autographs after the show – the line was long. I snapped a pic from afar while we were walking out. I’m not invested enough to wait two hours for an autograph. I’ll stick with that whole clichéd “riding off into the sunset” cowboy fantasy instead.)
(Intensely staring into a pretty blonde’s eyes. Why do I feel like he has done this before?)
But, enough about cowboys. Let’s get down to the salads.
For someone who claims to love salads so much (every WIAW features a gigantic salad), it is shocking that I have never actually posted a salad recipe to this blog. Well, other than my kitchen sink salad from back in the NYC days. And those were the days when cooking to me meant throwing a bunch of processed stuff in a bowl and calling it dinner.
I’ve come a long way, my friends.
Anyway, recently, I’ve been on a warm salad kick. It’s still cold and gray here in the midwest, and I’m not ready to transition to summery fruit salads just yet. For those of you that find the idea of a warm salad puzzling, let me explain. Technically, a warm salad is a salad with any warm component, such as warm chicken, bacon, salad dressing etc.
For this particular salad, I sautéed the kale with a lemon shallot vinaigrette until the leaves were slightly wilted and then topped with some candied walnuts, cranberries and fresh parmesan cheese. Rule #1 of Sometimes Healthy Cooking: Everything is better with cheese (and chocolate).
