The Mission

I love to cook. I love to watch cooking shows. I am also guilty of daily checking way too many cooking blogs. I decided to take the recipes I really, really wanted to make and tweak them by substituting ingredients I could find in my local grocery store. You can eat extremely well at home without pricey and hard to find ingredients. I made the decision to buy locally and grow what I could on my own. The results have been delicious. I look forward to sharing my adapted recipes with those of you who want to cook with local ingredients.

I recently found lots of fresh spinach at my local grocery store. I was not a huge fan of spinach until I married my husband, who could eat spinach at every meal. Knowing my husband's love of it, I decided to pick up a couple of packages and find something to do with it. I also thought some fresh asparagus would be nice with the spinach, so I grabbed a bunch of it, too. At home, I found a recipe for a spinach caesar salad online. Traditional caesar dressing calls for a raw egg yolk and anchovies. Because I want my kids to eat with us, I decided to leave out the egg and anchovies. I set out to tweak! The results are below.

Spinach Caesar Salad with Asparagus

1 lb. of fresh spinach
1 bunch of asparagus (if you so desire)
1 TB mayonnaise
1 TB dijon mustard
2 cloves minced garlic
1/4 c red wine vinegar
1 tsp kosher salt
1/2 tsp fresh cracked pepper
a couple of dashes of worcestershire sauce - to your taste
1/2 c olive oil

For the asparagus: Bend asparagus stalks to snap off the tough part. Cut asparagus on an angle to give you three portions from each stalk. Put asparagus in a pot of boiling salted water for two minutes. Remove and immediately put in a bowl of ice water to stop cooking. Done!

Add all ingredients but the olive oil to a blender and blend well. Slowly drizzle in olive oil to emulsify.

Put spinach and asparagus in a large bowl. Drizze dressing over greens and toss to coat. Enjoy!