Two Salads and Dried Thyme

And the last couple of dishes based on last Saturday's haul! Since I had a half-bag of baby heirloom romaine lettuce, a salad was in order. I wasn't in a big rush with this one--the romaine was much less delicate than butter lettuce is. I actually kept the lettuce in a bowl in the fridge, covered with a kitchen towel, for about three days, and it was only slightly limp by the time I made the salad.



In any case, since I still had a bunch of thyme and one shallot on hand, I used Google to search for dressing recipes with those two ingredients. This recipe for lemon thyme vinaigrette seemed to fit the bill. I didn't have lemon thyme specifically, but everything else worked out. So I chopped up the shallot and MUCH more thyme than was required by the recipe and put 'em in the salad dressing shaker.



Then I added in the rest of the (approximate) ingredients and shook everything up. The dressing kept well in the fridge--it got a little goopy, but a few minutes sitting on the counter at room temperature fixed things.





Since the dressing would be too much for one salad, I decided to make a second salad, with just feta and tomato.



For the lettuce-based salad, I figured some steak would be a decent protein to add--I had breakfast steak in the freezer (I'd bought a pack at Fresh Thyme a few months ago; I cooked one and froze the other two). I used the rosemary-infused olive oil when I did the frying.



So the ingredients for the steak salad ended up being:

• Baby heirloom romaine lettuce (about four handfuls)
  
• Half of the vinaigrette made according to the recipe
  
• A couple of handfuls of sunflower seeds
  
• One breakfast steak, sliced into strips
  
• One tomato, roughly diced
  
• Half a block of feta, crumbled

The tomato salad was much simpler--less pretty, but still delicious:

• One tomato, roughly diced
  
• Half a block of feta, crumbled
  
• Half of the vinaigrette made according to the recipe

And even after that, I STILL had thyme left over.



Since I was running low on dried thyme, I stripped the remaining bunch of leaves and set them in a ramekin to dry. Depending on the amount of herbs, this takes about 2-3 days.

1. Make sure the herb is in smallish pieces. If you're doing parsley, for example, you'll need to chop it finely.
   
2. Put the herb in a flat dish--you will want to make sure the herb is in a thin layer.
   
3. Set the dish in a safe place, away from possible moisture.
   
4. Check on the dish twice or so every day, stirring it with your fingertips to make sure all the bits get dried sufficiently.

Simple!



And tomorrow's another market day! We'll see if I can keep up this pace.