Wednesday, December 26, 2007

CSA week five - tuna avocado salad

I really did intend to make the beer battered avocado, and I may still (although a fritter version with shrimp and hot peppers looks appealing too), but I forgot that beer batter needs to rest for an hour to two and I was hungry now. So I scanned over the the California cuisine recipe list to try to get a sense of it so I could adapt its general culinary zeitgeist to whatever ingredients I could scrounge up. Here's what I came up with:

Tuna avocado salad

1/2 Monroe avocado, chopped coarsely
7 oz. tuna (packed in a pouch not a can. The pouch tuna really is worth the extra cost.)
2 T finely chopped onion
1 T finely chopped jalapeño
2 T finely chopped black olives (I don't really know what kind. They taste kalamata-esque but they're not pitted or as dried)

dressing:
1 T lemon juice
1 T champagne vinegar
2 T olive oil
1 T Dijon mustard

salt and pepper to taste. And herbs if you can figure out what might go with all of that. Basil maybe? Or parsley? (I settled on parley, which I mixed into the leftovers. It added a nice herbal note without overwhelming the other flavors.)

mix the dressing, mix the salad, mix the dressing into the salad. And you're done.

Serve over greens or in a wrap. That would be appropriately Californian.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I think the various flavors matched nicely, although that may have been helped considerably by the relatively bland Monroe avocado. Visually, it's quite striking with the chunks of black and green against the tan tuna background. Some nice textural contrasts too or I could mash it up a bit and make a sandwich spread out of it.

No comments: