April 28: Grilled Chicken, Rosemary Polenta and Salad with Ginger-Shallot Dressing

For a quick Thursday dinner, Paul and I decided to grill some chicken (marinated in an Asian-peanut type dressing), alongside the final pieces of the rosemary polenta (I know, from like 2 weeks ago. I do not like to throw things out -- especially yummy things!). We had ingredients to make a salad, and to pair with the chicken -- we decided to make it "Asian-inspired" as well. How very Top Chef of me...just kidding.

I chopped up some shallots and ginger.

The shallots, ginger and minced garlic all went into the food processor to be blended. I added olive oil and some rice wine vinegar. I also added a tablespoon of water, based on the suggestion from one of our cookbooks. That was a great idea -- I would normally just dump in more olive oil to thin the dressing out, which may end up making it more oily than it needs to be.

About 3/4 of the way there -- I ran it through a few more times to get it smooth.

It took a few minutes to get it to the right consistency -- I had to stop and scrape down the sides of the bowl in order to get everything blended together and not lumpy.

Crunchy! Just realizing now that the radishes may have contributed to the bitterness of the salad as well.

We added some thinly sliced radishes and carrots to the lettuce. I did think the shallot flavor came through too strongly in the dressing. You put them in raw, which is what the book suggested, but I think I will pan fried them to soften the flavor up a little bit next time. There was some nice onion breath happening in our apartment. Glad you guys couldn't smell us through the blog.

We had the salad with the grilled chicken and the leftover polenta. The gingery dressing did help compliment the Asian flavors of the chicken, though they were very mild. 

'Til next time... :)