We went to the Farmer’s Market in Boulder on Saturday morning and picked up a few things that were available this early in the season.  We bought some purple potatoes, parsnips, and spinach.  We were planning on having steaks and roasted potatoes for dinner Saturday night and we didn’t have any specific plans for the produce we bought.  Thanks to teething, Jake took longer than normal to go down and while I was laying with him I came up with an idea for the produce.  We made a wilted spinach salad with roasted purple potatoes and shaved parsnips, with a maple mustard vinaigrette.

I have been making my own salad dressings thanks to the guidelines in the book How to Cook Everything.  After making Mark Bittman’s basic vinaigrettes I started to see a pattern and started experimenting with some of my own dressings.  This has been my favorite salad dressing so far! After eating it on our salads we fried some french fries the next day and ate it as a dipping sauce, which was also delicious.

For the salad:

I roasted potatoes in the oven with olive oil to coat at 450 for about 40 minutes or until crispy.  I like spinach better cooked a little bit, so I wilted it in a pan with a little bit of olive oil for a couple of minutes.  I put the spinach on the plate, topped with the roasted potatoes, and shredded parsnips, salt and pepper.

Maple Mustard Vinaigrette:

3/4 cups olive oil

1/4 cup white wine vinegar

3 tbsp maple syrup

1 tbsp spicy brown mustard

2 tbsp shallots

salt & pepper to taste

Add the white wine vinegar, maple syrup, mustard, shallots and salt and pepper to a food processor, and blend thoroughly.  Add the olive oil a little at a time and blend.  Adding the olive oil a little at a time should create an emulsion.

Enjoy!

Tags: gluten free

This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.