Bayona House Salad with Balsamic Vinaigrette

Roast chicken breasts with a simple side salad and fresh bread is one of our favorite meals.  There is something comforting and satisfying about a really good roast chicken.  The dish is a fundamental component of the American repertoire.  Our go-to recipe for roast chicken breasts is Alex's Roast Chicken.  We have found that it is the best recipe to get crispy skin, succulent chicken, and flavorful drippings.  Usually we pair our roast chicken breasts with a simple arugula salad and call it a night, but seeing as we had arugula for lunch and dinner already this week, I wanted to do something different to go with our chicken breasts.  Our Susan Spicer cookbook has some great salads (like the Bayona Caesar Salad we made back in February) and has become my go-to cookbook when I want to try out a new salad recipe.  I was flipping through the cookbook while trying to figure out what we should make with our roast chicken breasts for dinner, and I came across this recipe for Bayona House Salad with Balsamic Vinaigrette.  It seemed like a very simple salad, with a slight twist, which was exactly what I was looking for.  And then I gave the salad even more of a twist by topping it with Rogue Creamery's Smokey Blue Cheese, which I saw in Fairway and decided sounded interesting.  Apparently Smokey Blue Cheese is a Roquefort-style cheese that is cold-smoked for 16 hours over hazelnut shells to give it a unique distinctively smokey, but not overwhelming, flavor.  I really thought this cheese was fantastic.  It brought a whole new level of flavor to the salad.  I think that the salad would have been good with any good blue cheese, but it really sang with the Smokey Blue.  I thought that the dressing, with its combination of balsamic vinegar, apple cider vinegar, Dijon mustard, honey, evoo and fresh lemon juice was really nice.  I definitely preferred it to your textbook balsamic vinaigrette because it had a nice balance of sweetness and acidity.  And I thought the vinaigrette was really nice with the Satur Farms mesclun because it didn't overpower the delicate lettuces and greens.  Our only complaint about the salad was that we wished we had topped the salad with some toasted pecans or walnuts or homemade croutons to give the salad some texture.

Recipe after the jump!

Bayona House Salad with Balsamic Vinaigrette

Crescent City Cooking: Unforgettable Recipes from Susan Spicer's New Orleans

By Susan Spicer

INGREDIENTS:

mix of assorted greens (2-3 cups per person), cleaned and dried

Balsamic Vinaigrette, as needed (approximately 2 tbsp per portion)

Gran Padano or blue cheese, such as Great Hill Blue or Roquefort, as desired

Toss the desired amount of greens with just enough dressing to lightly coat each leaf.  Top with shaved Gran Padano or crumbled blue cheese, as desired.

Balsamic Vinaigrette

Crescent City Cooking: Unforgettable Recipes from Susan Spicer's New Orleans

By Susan Spicer

INGREDIENTS:

2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

1 tbsp plus 1 tsp Dijon mustard

1 tbsp honey

3/4 cup evoo

1 tbsp fresh lemon juice

s&p

Whisk together vinegars, mustard and honey in a small bowl, then gradually whisk in evoo.  Add lemon juice and seasoning with s&p to taste.