How To Make Asparagus and Shrimp Salad

Wait! Don’t click away yet. You might think you don’t like asparagus. Or you like it, but think that using it as the base of a salad — and pairing it with shrimp, no less — doesn’t sound all that great. But trust me on this one.

This was a leap of faith for me, too. My wife had a version of this at a nice restaurant. She came home raving about it, and I just couldn’t imaging it tasting good. But I trusted her. (Or at least I trusted that yes, she liked it.) So we made this.

Omigawd. Wow. And along the way, I discovered that blanched asparagus is freaking good.

Ingredients

2 pounds asparagus, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 pound shrimp, cooked
juice of ½ lemon
1 large yellow bell pepper, diced
1 large can (28 ounces) diced tomatoes

Dressing

1/3 cup red wine vinegar
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
1 tablespoon parsley
½ teaspoon basil
1 teaspoon garlic powder
juice of ½ lemon lemon
juice from canned tomatoes

Directions

The dressing

Combine all ingredients — vinegar, oil, salt, pepper, parsley, basil, garlic powder and lemon juice.

Add half the juice from the canned tomatoes. Don’t worry if a few pieces of tomato fall in, you’ll take care of that with the immersion blender.

Blend until the tomatoes are completely liquefied and the oil and vinegar are not separating.

Set the dressing aside while you work on the rest.

Blanching

Blanching vegetables softens the tough outer fibers without cooking away all the flavor inside. And more importantly, without turning them to mush. This is one technique that not enough grandmothers used. If you grew up thinking that all vegetables were the texture of baby food, you had a mother who didn’t know the magic of blanching.

To blanch veggies, you need a pot of boiling water and a bowl of ice water.

I prefer to salt the water pretty heavily. It really helps to get a bit of flavor into the veggies so they’re not just a way to get the dressing to your mouth.

Put the asparagus in the boiling water in small batches. If the water stops boiling, you’ve added too much.

After about 30 seconds, scoop the asparagus out. You’ll see that the color has changed from a dull, olive-like color to a bright green. Don’t cook much past the color change.

Drain briefly, then put the cooked asparagus immediately into the ice water to stop it from cooking.

Stop now and try a piece. Blanched asparagus is awesome. Surprisingly sweet, with plenty of the flavor I like from grilled asparagus. Why don’t I see this on more menus?

Prepping shrimp

Feel free to get fresh shrimp and cook them yourself. I’ll probably do that in a future post. For now, I just got the pre-cooked frozen shrimp and thawed it.

To remove the tail, don’t think of it as pulling the tail off. Think of it as squeezing the shrimp out of the tail. Pinch right at the base of the tail and squeeze. The shrimp should pop out clean without having to pull on it.

Chop the shrimp into bite-size pieces.

Squeeze in a little lemon and toss to coat. Besides adding flavor, this will help preserve the color of the shrimp.

Assembly

Pour a little of the vinaigrette into a large bowl and swirl it around.

Add the asparagus, shrimp, pepper and tomatoes.

Add most, but not all, of the vinaigrette and toss everything together.

Reserve a little of the dressing until after you taste it. If it needs more you can always add it.

Viola

Refrigerate for about an hour, and toss again just before serving.

And that’s it.

Options

Everyone who has tried this agrees that adding cheese would make it too heavy. As is, this is a great, light salad that’s still substantial enough to serve as a main course.

The original version that served as the inspiration was topped with generous handfuls of fresh cilantro. Try serving it with bowls of several different fresh herbs, so guests can top their however they like.

One change I’ll probably make in the next batch is to add a little diced red onion. Not just for flavor, but also for color.