I saw this recipe in Southern Living magazine last year and thought that it looked good. We added some Baby Bam croutons and it was pretty yummy, although the photo on Southern Living’s site is better than mine. We also sliced up the onions after grilling them, because the kids aren’t into big chunks of onion (although cutting them was difficult, because the olive oil made them slippery!).
My brother was the first person to tell me about grilling romaine. He saw Alton Brown make this recipe on his show and said it looked good, so I’m going to give that one a try soon. All in all, this salad was good (the grilled onions were deliciously sweet) and the dressing was yummy, but it would have been equally good with plain, ungrilled romaine. The grilling is just kind of a novelty. The Alton Brown recipe, however, adds a crunchy, grilled parmesan crustiness that might make the grilling worthwhile (and that whole “frozen vinegar crystals” thing sounds really cool).
We served this salad with Sweet and Sour BBQ chicken tenders and some “Parisian” carrots. The carrots are odd and have a long (and a bit embarrassing) explanation. Every year, I make a big lunch for Boy and Girl’s teachers. One of the dishes that I make is a green bean and yellow wax bean salad. Fresh green beans and especially the yellow wax beans are hard to come by, so I buy a frozen yellow and green bean blend (HEB’s “Prince Edward Medley), which also happens to contain the little, round “Parisian” carrots. So…in order to make the bean dish, I have to sort out the carrots (Girl helped this year) and I save them for future use, like tonight, when I micro-steamed them in some chicken stock and sprinkled them with….you guessed it….Baby Bam.