BEST SALAD EVER

I've been trying to bully my chef husband into writing up some of his easy go-to recipes so I could post them here, but he seems to be what I guess you'd call an "intuitive" chef (at least when cooking at home.) Which means that extracting specific amounts out of him is nearly impossible, because he doesn't understand how someone could need that. Even though I need that. Which he should know, because whenever I have to apply my own oil and vinegar to something, I fuck it up and text him to complain. But anyway, I tried my best because I really wanted to share this salad with you.

Let me tell you about this salad.

It's the best goddamn salad ever. 

I am not what you would call an enthusiastic eater of salads. I hate the way lettuce tastes, and I'm very neurotic sensitive to textures when it comes to veggies (example: the crunch of snap peas is okay, the crunch of bean sprouts is disgusting.) But this salad? I will hoover it up like it's made of sweet, sweet oxygen.

It's really all about the strawberries, goat cheese, and balsamic, which are three flavors that probably live in a new-agey three-way marriage where they all love each other very much because they are so freakin' perfect for each other that I can't stand to imagine it any other way. The lettuce is really just a canvas- a nice boring surface to cut the intensity and add a little crunch. It's kind of like when you wrap a dog's medicine in cheese to trick them into eating it, except the medicine in this case is "vegetables."

But enough jabber.

The Best Salad Ever 

Makes about 2 servings

• 3 leaves of Romaine lettuce, washed and chopped up 
• 5 strawberries, beheaded and sliced 
• "Some crumbles" of goat cheese (I'd estimate a heaping tablespoon? Travis was not helpful here.) 
• "A drizzle" of olive oil (extra virgin, none of that promiscuous stuff) 
• "A few splashes" of balsamic vinegar (yeah, vague, I know. If you have a favorite balsamic vinaigrette recipe you could probably sub that in instead of the oil and vinegar.) 
• A small pinch of salt 
• Optional: some chopped candied walnuts. We often leave this out because they're not super cheap, as ingredients go, and you don't really NEED them, but they're tasty. 

Mix that shit together. Eat it. Marvel at the fact that most of the things in it are actually pretty healthy.

Cake Balls: Yummy like cake, with twice the work!

I was planning on titling* this post "See, I'm not completely useless in the kitchen" but then my cake balls came out looking like this:

So... apparently I kind of am. Though to be fair, those are the balls I covered with Wilton's Shitty Shitmelt, which I'm pretty sure is made of equal parts candle wax and shattered dreams. They lured me in with their "Midnight Black" color, preying heartlessly on my debilitating** weakness for halloween and my sentimentality for my brief goth phase. "Black cake balls!" thought I, with childish glee. "With red velvet inside! It will be so halloweeny!"

Long story short- it never reaches a dippable consistency, it just gets all toothpasty. Like thick frosting. The package says you can thin it with vegetable shortening (yum?) but of course I didn't have any around since I assumed, foolishly, that candy melts would actually melt. Travis had the brilliant idea to cut it with some coconut oil, which did significantly help the consistency, though I'm a little wary of the added flavor. Coconut + red velvet + cream cheese? Hmm.

Anyway, I ran out of that crap pretty quickly and covered the rest in regular old dark chocolate:

Much better. Granted, they're still more "cake blob" than "cake ball," but listen, I am an artist. You can't just expect me to conform to everyone else's idea of "what a cake ball should look like" or "what kind of sprinkles actually show up on chocolate" or "how many of them I can eat without throwing up."

It really did look great at the cake stage. I should've just stopped there. Oh well.

This is pretty much the "recipe" I used, except I made homemade cream cheese frosting instead of canned stuff (and I have a lot of it left... need to think up a use for it.)

*I can't believe that's actually how you spell that. Tit-ling. Snorgt.

** I used to get extra time on exams in September and October because the teachers knew I was too busy fantasizing about costumes.***

*** That's a lie, and a tasteless one at that.