Not-Quite-Greek Salad

Last night I was called on to make the salad for our meal with B's grandparents. My MIL had picked up a beautiful butter lettuce from the farmers market that morning, so that was where I started.

I knew we had some feta cheese, and some kalamata olives, so I figured I'd make a Greek/Mediterranean style salad. Once I had all the ingredients out I realized there was no cucumber! Grr! Oh well, I just substituted some sugar snap peas. So now I guess it's a not-quite-Greek salad. Good enough.

I thought the ingredients were so pretty, and I have B's nice camera available now (yipee!) so I took the veg outside for a photo shoot.

When I went outside to pick some of our fresh oregano I found these pretty freesias hiding in the sage bush! Surprise!

So here is the salad, pretty much done. I ended up using the whole head of butter lettuce plus a few large leaves of red lettuce. One tomato (because that's all we had!), some chopped kalamata olives, crumbled feta, 1/4 yellow bell pepper, fresh oregano leaves, sugar snap peas, and sunflower seeds to top it all off. We added a bit of mediterranean salad dressing when it was served.

This went pretty well with our BBQ chicken (I know, it's just been a BBQ kinda week) and corn. Tasty stuff!

You'd think I would have been satisfied, but half way through watching the new Clash of the Titans (which was an awesome effects movie that almost had a plot and acting in it too!) B and I went on a dessert binge! I started innocently enough with some dark chocolate covered cranberries, then moved to a square of Valrhona dark chocolate (my absolute FAVORITE! Love the smooth richness, the decadence...but I digress.). Did we stop here? NO! We also had a small slice of pie each (ok, B's was about a sixth of the whole pie) with some vanilla ice cream on top. Oh man, I think I can see that ice cream sitting on my hips as I type!

After Clash of the Titans B and I went out for a short walk around the yard, ending on our bench with a great view of the sky. The stars were so bright, and the evening was so mild. We stayed there for a while, just gazing. Our wait was worth it, because we ended up seeing our own mini meteor shower! There were about 6 very fast shooting stars pretty close together. A great finish to our day!