Have you ever made a salad so amazing that you didn't even need dressing? Ok, maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe your will power is superhuman. How about, have you ever made a salad so good that your French Dressing addict of a boyfriend said, "this is so tasty, I don't need dressing." Exactly... Now you see where I am going with this.
So in a quest to eat healthy, I bought a 5 pound bag of spinach. Nothing is healthier than buying spinach. Well, I suppose consuming it is. But 5 pounds?! Really!? I know. So now the goal is: how many things can I make in the shortest amount of time so the pillow of spinach doesn't go bad.
The salad ingredients are:
3 to 4 handfuls of Spinach
1/2 of a small red onion (I got a gargantuan onion and used 1/4 of it)
4 mushrooms
1/2 a jalepeno, seeded
3 green onions
cilantro, to taste (Personally, I could eat a salad exclusively made of cilantro)
garbanzo beans
olives
garlic salt
seasoning salt
The tempura ingredients are:
5 already made Trader Joes Tempura shrimps (I'm like Sandra Lee, ya'll! Minus the cocktail hour)
Heat oven to 400 degrees, toss in shrimp, walk away.
Wash the spinach and the green onion. Set aside. The magic doesn't happen there. Wash and chop up the mushroom, jalepeno, and red onion. Put about 1/2 a teaspoon of olive oil in a pan and set on medium. Once the oil heats up, toss in the red onion. Stir a tad so it looks as though every piece is uniformly coated. (The magic of sauteed onion is that no matter what you end up making, someone will always say, "Damn, something smells GOOD!" Seriously. Every.Single.Time.)
Once the onion is smelling up the place like you know what you're doing, toss in the mushrooms. And a dash of garlic salt. Stir the mixture until the onions start to turn translucent. Now, toss in the jalepeno. No seriously. Just do it. I promise it's not going to be as hot as you think. Keep stirring.
Open oven, flip shrimp over.
From here, the oil seemed to have been absorbed by the mushrooms, so I went to reach for my rosemary infused olive oil (that I made... Suck it Martha!) but instead grabbed the Bertolli. The Bertolli must've sensed my initial rejection, because the cap proceeded to slice my hand as if to say "how dare you worship other olive oils before me!" Bertolli is THAT kind of an olive oil. Anywho, once everything was all simmering in the pan and my bandaid was in place, I tossed in about a handful of the spinach and a quick dash of the seasoning salt. I have no idea why. But sometimes, you just gotta believe. During the time I was contemplating whether or not I made the right move, I chopped up the green onion and put it on top of the fresh spinach.
So once all the spinach in the pan was kinda wilted (which is what happens to cooked spinach, no big woop) I put this on top of the bed of fresh spinach and the chopped green onions. Then I added half a can of garbanzo beans and half a can of black olives. I tasted the salad and swooned, but felt as though it was missing something. So I rummaged through the fridge until I found it: CILANTRO! Toss that sucker up, opened the oven, and placed two of the crispiest pieces of tempura shrimp on the side. The whole meal was so full of flavor that we didn't need soy sauce or French dressing. And dude, salad for a meal... hardcore.
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