Blood Orange Salad & Vinaigrette

The legendary Marcella Hazan has a lovely recipe for orange and cucumber salad in her book, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. There are many other Italian recipes featuring oranges in a salad, so I'm sure that this is where the spark of inspiration came from for my recipe, but I'm notorious for coming home from the grocery store with a lot of items that I didn't have on my shopping list. It's an addiction and it goes like this: Oh, blood oranges! They'd be gorgeous on a bed of lettuce, then I could balance things out with some type of salty cheese, pistachios and ....

Blood oranges don't have a long season in my part of the world. They're in the stores for maybe two to three months. When I spy them, this is how I like to use their colorful flesh.

As you can see from this animation of the assembly of my salad, it goes pretty quickly, yes, it's gorgeous, and I can confirm that it's as delicious as it looks. And there's even enough dressing left for a quick salad for one. You'll pour all of the dressing on the salad and toss well to coat everything in the blood orange vinaigrette. Once you've spooned the salad into individual serving bowls, pour the remaining dressing into a small glass jar. Whoever uses this "leftover" dressing will be blown away, because now you have the dressing infused with the onion and blue cheese! 

You can sear a few jumbo shrimp to serve over the salad, but it's perfectly satisfying all on its own. Here's the printable recipe.