Simplistic Ingredients

When ingredients are presented in its most simplistic forms with just a dash of seasoning, the outcome is delicious.  We don't need to load on the heavy spices or pounds of sauce to make our food taste like something.  What we should be doing is using spices or sauce to enhance the flavors of the ingredients, not cover it up.  Farm-raised, Free-range, Organic, In-season are all words we hear in the grocery and markets today; it's the craze.  But what we, mostly Americans sorry to say, don't realize is that this has always been the craze.  It's just fact that simple, home-grown, local ingredients are better.  When visiting Europe this past summer (2010), the Europeans (Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Austria) always use local, fresh, cream-of-the-crop ingredients.  They resource out to farmers whom they know how to grow the best of that product whether it be cheese or proscuitto or lettuce or pasta, it's who the people are represented in their food.

With that said, last weekend (March 26) I cooked a 3-course Italian dinner for a family and their friends from an auction they won from the Charlotte Rotary.  I made a simple "Italian" dinner for them using ingredients which I only lightly enhanced to bring out its flavors.  Below is a picture of the salad: Baby Arugula, Goat cheese, Seared Strawberries, Proscruitto, and Pistachio Dust in a Orange Balsamic Vinaigrette.  Simple ingredients = abundance of flavors.  (The dinner party loved it.)

Making your own food from natural ingredients isn't hard, just combine what you like.  In this spring salad, these were ingredients I liked and that the hosts said they liked.  A little bit of sweet, some peppery flavors from the arugula, tangy from the cheese, salty from the proscuitto and pistachios, and an over-all mouth appeal when dressed in balsamic vinaigrette. Light, simplistic.