Last night we had dinner at my and Jacob’s new favorite restaurant, Il Passatore. It’s across the street from a Hess gas station on Bushwick Avenue and Metropolitan Ave, and from the front looks unspectacular. Inside, there is a long, narrow room that’s crowded almost every evening, though when it’s nice out, like it was last night, it’s the twinkly-light filled back patio that’s full instead. The waiters are friendly and unhurried, but attentive and put down a basket of homemade bread and fruity olive-oil speckled in balsamic as soon as you’ve had a seat. The wine carafes are filled to the brim and nightly specials are scrawled on brown paper and attached to a clipboard. We’ve had a handful of fantastic homemade pastas — the tagliatelle with wild boar ragu, papardelle with fresh spring peas, fabulous ricotta gnocchi — but the dishes that really win me over, believe it or not, are the salads. I’ve tried to recreate these salads at home, and invite you to do the same. Excellent ingredients are key, because as you will see, they are simple, but if made well, the completely, and utterly, delicious.

Salad #1: Wild arugula with halved red grapes, toasted pine nuts, grape tomatoes, grated Parmesan cheese and balsamic vinaigrette
Salad #2: Baby spinach with blueberries, toasted pine nuts, fresh goat cheese, and a slightly sweet citrus vinaigrette (lemon-grapefruit combo?)

I’ve picked up a wild arugula, pea shoots, and a bunch of my favorite green, purslane, as well as a box of blueberries form the farmers’ market to try my hand at a variant of salad #2. If you have any of your own summer salad recipes, please do pass them along to me as well. I’m on a kick, and it’s produce season at its best.

Published Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 1:30 pm. Filed under Food, Restaurants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.