September 25, 2009

Blue Cheese and Yellow Tomato Salad

Holy tomatoes!!  Check these out.  Fresh, garden grown tomatoes of 5 different varieties.


Are you jealous?


The other day at church, I complained how I had bought one tomato at the store for 80 cents.  It's ridiculous, yeah?  Then the next day, Fr. Patrick brought me a big bag full of tomatoes that he had grown in his garden.  That's why i call them Holy Tomatoes. 


Look at these beautiful tomatoes...they're so fresh, and you won't believe how sweet they are.


I can't stop eating the yellow ones plain...they're like candy.


In fact, i'd rather eat these tomatoes instead of any kind of candy, any day.  YUM.


But what to do with these tomatoes?  I would have eaten them straight, one by one, if i could have, but that wouldn't make much of a blog post.  Pictures of me eating tomato after tomato.  Haha.


So here is the first thing I made.  I used blue cheese and yellow tomatoes to make a Maize and Blue salad in honor of my favorite football team in the whole world.  And because blue cheese is fabulous.


Ingredients:
-1-2 cups yellow pear tomatoes, halved
-1/4 cup blue cheese crumbles
-1 cup cucumbers, chopped
-1/2 red onion, chopped
-2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
-1 bunch of fresh basil
-3 large cloves of garlic, sliced thin

1.  Wash the little tomatoes.  Yum!


And cut them in half.


Are these ridiculously beautiful or what??



2.  Chop your cucumbers and onions.



3.  Now, get your blue cheese ready!


Combine tomatoes, cucumbers, onions together with blue cheese. 


4.  Add the balsamic vinegar.


5.  Hand tear some basil and throw it into the mix.  Everything is better with basil.



Yum!  So fresh and so fragrant!  I had this salad with half a toasted whole wheat pita.  Look how pretty it is!


The super sweet yellow pear tomatoes with the pungent blue cheese were a surprisingly fantastic pairing.  Here it is all mixed up!


And the balsamic and basil never hurts when it comes to flavor :)


Try this salad for a change to the standard tomato basil mozzerella (caprese) salad!  It'll knock your socks off, and it's a much healthier alternative to normal football game food :)


Or at least, if you're gonna have a burger while you're tailgating, this is a nice salad to counterbalance the unhealthiness in the meal.  Or something like that.  GO BLUE!! :D


For a printable version of this recipe, please click here.

4 comments:

  1. Yum....looks delicious!! So vibrant!!

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  2. I've been wondering (since last time you had another recipe with cheese) why your cheeses seem so crumbly, I mean those we get in HK look much more solid, do they taste different?

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  3. thanks, nurseknitsalot! p.s. i'm a huge knitting fiend myself, anything you suggest i could knit that would be useful/cute in the kitchen?

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  4. hey charles! the cheese i used in this recipe is pre-crumbled blue cheese. Same thing with the feta cheese i used in that polenta recipe (i'm guessing that's the one you're referring to?). You can for sure get them in a more solid form, but americans prefer to use crumbled cheese as toppings for pastas and salads, so they often sell them in pre-crumbled format. they don't taste any different, it's just the texture. blue cheese and feta have really low moisture levels, so they are easy to crumble.

    i think the appeal of crumbled feta and blue cheeses is that they are very pungent cheeses such that if you eat a block of them, it might give you flavor and sodium overload :)

    ReplyDelete

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