I have made this salad more times than I care to remember, but I keep coming back for more – excellent as a side salad, main event, or as a nibble to accompany drinks, I also make the basil dressing alone to drizzle over roast or BBQ chicken because it’s delicious. This amount of dressing will last you for a couple of meals, and the amount of tomatoes and cheese listed is deliberately vague as it can be scaled up if you’re serving a crowd – this works well as a side salad for 4 I’d suggest. Give me some lovely bread and lettuce leaves and I’d demolish half of it for lunch easily.
Ingredients
Salad:
Cherry tomatoes on the vine
1 ball of mozzarella
Slurp of olive oil
Slurp of balsamic vinegar
Dressing:
20g basil, leaves only
4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
Plenty of salt + pepper
Method
- Make the dressing by whizzing together the ingredients using a stick blender or processor, testing to see if you need to add more red wine vinegar or seasoning. Set aside.
- For the salad itself, heat the slurp of oil in a frying pan, add in the tomatoes (keep them on the vine!) and cook for 5+ minutes until starting to char and soften. Give the pan a jiggle every now and then.
- When the toms look like they’re getting there, slosh in a slurp of balsamic vinegar, give it a good swirl around and let it heat up.
- Assemble the salad by snipping the tomatoes into pleasing groups and putting them on your serving dish with ripped up pieces of the mozzarella.
- Drizzle over the dressing artfully with a spoon, then tip on the remaining balsamic from the frying pan.
From My Kitchen 