Watercress with Fragrant Wasabi Dressing

Mother Nature wants to compensate for the “wishy-washy” summer we’ve been having so far, by sending us, at last, some warm and sunny weather, for more than five straight days. Couldn’t be better timing as I was on vacation the past few days. One text message I received from a friend the other day read; “am I seeing things, like… a bright sun?” What I mean by “wishy-washy” is that we, Montrealers took the slightly bothersome habit of carrying our umbrellas every single day throughout the entire summer. For instance, we would walk out of our homes with full sunshine beaming at our doorsteps, but then later on we’d be running “au plus sacrant” a few minutes later, for shelter to flee the sudden heavy rain. Go figure. We gave up consulting the local weather channel and just relied on our umbrellas. Even one of my Facebook friends wanted to rename the Facebook Montreal Network to the Vancouver network!

But now that we’ve been having continuous sunshine, unfortunately near the end of summer, we’ve really been taking advantage of it by BBQ’ing like there’s no tomorrow, going to the pool, taking nice evening walks after dinner, or hanging out at outdoor cafés. For these summery days, one can only think of preparing a great refreshing salad.

I stumbled upon this recipe which is by far one of the simplest, yet innovative, salad recipes I’ve tried, while watching one of Nigella Lawson’s cooking episodes on the Food network. In my book, Nigella Lawson is a true cooking goddess who isn’t shy of showing how much she really enjoys eating good food. In fact, her well- endowed figure nicely represents her passion for good eating and cooking. Admirable.
Just to give this salad a bit more crispiness and coolness, I added some soya bean sprouts Excellent.

Preparation: 10 minutes tops

Recipe "au pif":
Fresh watercress, enough to serve 4, well rinsed and washed
1 cup fresh soya bean sprouts
1 cup fresh sugar snaps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_pea) (remove string running along the top of the pod from base to tip)
4 tbsp Canola oil (or any vegetable oil)
3 tsp lime juice
1 tsp wasabi paste (any asian grocery store)
½ tsp coarse sea salt (or ¼ tsp fine table salt)

Soak the sugar snaps in very hot water. Let it sit and rest and put aside for a few minutes. This should remove the “raw” taste of the sugar snaps but at the same time retain their crunch and sweetness. After roughly 5 minutes discard water through sieve.

In a large salad bowl, mix the watercress, soya bean sprouts and sugar snaps.

In a small jar, mix the oil, lime juice, wasabi paste and salt. Close lid tightly and shake the jar the dressing ingredients are well blended together.

Drizzle generously the wasabi dressing over the salad mix. Mix well and serve.

The wasabi perks up the salad with a tinge of heat.

Serves 4 people.

Enjoy.