March 2: Castle Salad Fiasco

It's not every day that you get invited to brunch in a castle. I suppose that's my excuse. I was so excited about going to my Uncle's birthday party at Spencer Castle in Victoria that I forgot to shop for my salad.
As a result, I showed up at the castle with a plastic bag holding the only items I'd found in the fridge that looked good enough to use: lettuce, tomatoes, almonds, and lemon poppy seed dressing. Stellar? Not even close. Embarrassing? Quite. But only briefly. Because of the four salads served today, mine was probably second best.
In my defense, I also took a quite wonderful and complicated Brazilian dish called feijoado, (a black-bean stew with several kinds of meat) which I had never made before, but which turned out very well.


Before I go on, I have to explain that Spencer Castle is not really a castle. It's a lovely old mansion built in 1912, and sold to a condo developer in the 70s.  There is a stone turret that is very castley looking, and it has an impressive marble staircase and a lot of crystal chandeliers, so it does feel a bit like being in a castle. The developers who bought it from the Spencer family agreed to their terms; they had to retain and keep up the "castle" and grounds. (By the way, the condos they built there are extremely ugly and not castley at all! I hear that they are nice inside, but outside they are just brick boxes.) Nowadays the main floor is used for weddings, funerals, and such, while the upper floor bedrooms are used as hospitality suites for the owners of the condos. This is how my Aunt and Uncle came to be staying there for the past month.

Okay, back to the salads. There was, of course, the ubiquitous Caesar salad. A good old standby, but boring (not to mention that it's full of gluten and dairy, and enough salt to choke a horse. Although come to think of it, I've never seen anyone feed Caesar salad to a horse.) And there was a very complicated salad that seemed to have every kind of nut, vegetable and fruit you could name on it, but which had no dressing. My salad was a bit of a relief for people; it was simple and fresh and you knew what you were getting.
The best salad today was a lovely California style salad made by a young lady named Jessie. I took pictures of it so that I can use her recipe, so you'll see it here before too long.

How-to:
Toss together red bib lettuce with sweet tomatoes (remove seeds and pulp and cut into bite-size pieces), and natural almonds, chopped and toasted, in a lemon-poppy seed dressing.