Javier Quiroga: Hi!

My name is Javier Quiroga and I am with To Your Taste Catering. Right now we are showing you the second course of our very romantic dinner that we are making and the dish we are making now is the mixed green salad with sliced strawberries, goat cheese and caramelize onion to dye for it. Awesome, awesome, awesome. And it also with balsamic vinegar dressing which is also very good. It goes--, all the ingredients go very very well together. Speaking of ingredients, what you need, mixed greens, five large strawberries. I have about quarter cup of goat cheese here. I have an onion. I am only going to use half of the onion for this and then I have balsamic vinegar dressing. You also going to need salt, pepper and a little bit of oil. As far as the tools are concerned, what you are going to need is going to be a very sharp knife, pair of tongs, a nice cutting board and a small saute pans. One thing we want to do, we are going to caramelize the onions and so it is not a very strong onion flavor, you don't want to have the onion breath on your date. You know what I mean? So, what we are going do, you have your onion here that's already cleaned. We are going to cut in half and then we are going to cut it here on the side here. Like that.

So you are cutting just like that. So you can have nice little strands of onion and then you know, once we start caramelizing it, it's going to start turning brown. So now we are going to put about two tablespoons of oil in your pan. Enough to coat the bottom. It seems like a lot but it is really like so--, all those onions going to soak up the oil and make sure your pan is pretty hot. Your heats on high rate now. And then what we are going to do. Well one thing I like to do to make this a little easier. I like to squeeze the onions a little bit. Alright. So release some of the juices like that alright. So then we will just go ahead and put them in there. And here is our saute pan. Be careful not to burn your hand. You want to leave one side of it to start browning itself. So you don't want to mess with it too much right now. We will just soak in these onions a little bit. And see how they are right now. They are nice and white. When we are done with them, this is going to be reduced probably by half. And what is going to happen with that? They are going to become sweet actually. Because all the sugar that burned and the onion, that is going to come out and we are going to move to our strawberries now. Alright.

These are very nice beautiful strawberries. All you want to do basically, you want to hold these stem back a little bit. Slice it right there, alright. And then you want to quarter these, okay. One here, one here. Okay. So you have nice quarters of strawberries here to garnish your salad. We are going to do the same thing to the rest. And the onions--, I know you guys are worried, you think onions are burning but they are not. I know exactly what is going on here. Lets see. It looks beautiful, see. Another good thing to do is add about a pinch, a pinch and half of salt. This also helps release all of the sugars that are inside the onion and they well be nice and caramelized in a little while. And then the goat cheese. Well, you could do two things. You can either cut it with a knife. I press, I just like to crumble it with my hand just like that. Okay. And you want to make sure that it is, it is very cold. You don't want to use room temperature cheese or anything like that because then, you can mess your fingers like mine and you don't want that. So the onion been caramelizing now, probably for about five minutes. That's the kind of color you want for them, you don't want more or less. And if you get a little too much oil, just like I did here, in the situation here, just drain them out a little bit and you want to make sure that again, you cool these. You don't want to put them in your salad hot because then it will take everything and it will fill everything. Put in the refrigerator or whatever and it will cool down. Let me put this right here in the freezer and it will cool down very fast. Then we can plate this--, start plating the salad here. Let me get just about a handful, not too much because you do not want full. We are going to put a few strawberries just for presentation sake also. Leaving a little bit of the white plate out when I put the dressing on top, I can put a little bit around the plate. It will make it look really really pretty. Alright. We have the onions. They are pretty much cooled. Okay. Little bit of the caramelized onions and then we are going to put little bit of the cheese on top. So right before you serve, you want to go ahead and put a little bit of dressing, right around, little bit in middle too. Alright. So there you have it. Your second course, mixed green salads with goat cheese caramelized onions and strawberries.