Well, a while back I posted on my previous blog about my love for salads and my strict requirements for the best possible salad, usually undoing the salad’s reputation as the “healthy alternative.” Eggs, cheese, bacon, avocados….not exactly low in fat. But the mouthfeel of the fatty accents make for a tasty way to round out the bite of a vinaigrette, or, say, red onions. Maybe a better alternative to eggs or cheese would be a nut – I love a good salad with strawberries, almonds or walnuts, red onions, but also of course le fromage bleu. Mmm.
So today I stopped by Publix on my way home from my morning Wine & Spirits class (tastings at 9am, oh yes) for a lunch – I will be gone for most meals through the rest of this week so I couldn’t do any heavy duty grocery shopping but I just picked up a few things for a few lunches. Today’s impromptu lunch was a tasty salad with pan-seared shrimp and scallops on it.
Leaf lettuce, sliced red onion, cherry tomato halves, scallions, gorgonzola cheese and my “house” dressing. 
Working at an Italian restaurant has made me appreciate the simplicity of dressings – a little oil, a little vinegar, some spices – and you have an awesome dressing. Reminiscent of the Villa Tronco house dressing, whose ingredients I obviously cannot divulge, my dressing goes a little something like this: 
Olive oil halfway up the container
Red wine vinegar to fill the container 3/4 of the way
A splash of balsamic vinegar
Sea salt – maybe about 2 t, just gauge according to size of container
Granulated garlic
Oregano
1 clove of garlic
My only hesitation about this dressing is the problem of the garlic clove. Garlic is known to carry botulism, which thrives in the absence of oxygen – so if you have a tight seal (which I do on my little mason jar) botulism could develop and infest the dressing. Yikes. A possible solution (other than refrigerating, which would cause the oil to congeal. Annoying) would be to blanch the garlic clove, roast it (that would be a tasty addition), or something of that nature so it does not remain uncooked. Or you can say to hell with it and risk getting a severe foodborne illness, your call.
For the shrimp and scallops, I just pan-seared them in a little butter with a tiny squeeze of lemon juice and s & p. Butter has a low smoking point because of its fat solids, so unless you are using clarified butter (which is butter slowly heated to bring the milk solids to the top and removed) or an oil with a higher smoking point (like Pomace oil, which is just crappy olive oil. Or canola oil or other vegetable oil) then I would recommend bringing up the heat slowly and then backing away from the pan as your food cooks. Any better recommendations?
And if you are grossed out by shrimp, which I frequently am, then I would tell you that I feel a lot better about eating shrimp that I have peeled and de-veined myself. Yes, it’s disgusting to know that the little “vein” is the shrimp’s digestive tract, but I do enjoy the comfort of knowing I can take 15 minutes if I want to to get that puppy clean. I did go about one month on an anti-shrimp kick once, but sometimes they are too hard to resist, poop and all. Well, on that note I’ll leave you with the final product:
trial & error 