Citrus Salad

I ate at Chez Panisse Cafe in February, using my sister's birthday as an excuse to eat here :) I called to make reservations exactly 2 months before, although they also take them through Open Table. It is not cheap, but it was worth it. The food was delicious and the staff was attentive. The prices... well it's not an everyday place (for me at least).

the Chez Panisse Cafe salad

I ordered their citrus salad with crab toasts. I've never been a big fan of citrus in salad, but this seemed so right. The crab on little toasts didn't hurt either. The combination of creamy avocado and sweet citrus stayed with me after the dinner, so I set out to make a version at home. I added arugula for some spiciness and heft so it could be a meal.

I used organic baby arugula, blood oranges, oranges, grapefruits, avocado, extra virgin olive oil and sea salt. That's it. Just supreme the fruit or slice horizontally (this is how chez panisse did it, but it was easier to for me to eat the supremes). I liked how the pieces of avocado weren't sliced into neat shapes, but in sort of organic shapes, like they just happened to fall off the pit onto my plate so I tried to do the same with a spoon.

How to supreme:
(btw I can't stop cutting fruit like this! I usually peel grapefruits section by section, but this is so much faster)

Slice off the top and bottom. (I use a ralphs bag for trash so the juice doesn't drip everywhere)

The slice vertically, going with the curve of the fruit. You can do small sections at once as long as you get the white pith off.



The third part I don't have a picture of because my hands were dripping with fruit juice at this point, but you will have a big naked ball of grapefruit. Hold the fruit in one hand and the knife in the other and cut each section out, leaving the bits of skin behind. That probably didn't help, so watch this video instead. Don't worry about wasting fruit, you'll be squeezing what's left into the salad.

Here I just sliced the fruit horizontally, instead of with the sections.

I used about a handful of arugula to half an orange, half a grapefruit, a whole blood orange (mine were small), half an avocado, all the fruit juice I could squeeze out, a pinch of salt and a heavy dosing of extra virgin olive oil.