Salad On The Cusp

What do you serve on a day that dawns bright and sunny a few days after the solstice, but is still breezy with a slight chill to the air?  The calendar says it's summer, but the air is still spring. I looked into the fridge and found two distinctly different sets of ingredients - lettuce, cherry tomatoes and avocado that wanted to be a salad, and broccoli, spicy Italian sausage, shiitake mushrooms, broccoli, and carrots that suggested a more wintry meal.


So, I figured, "What the heck!"


In a wide pan, I sautéed the sausage in a little olive oil, then added sliced mushrooms, chunked carrot, broccoli florets and cubes of slightly stale sourdough bread, one after the other, giving each just a few minutes to cook in the pan before adding the next. 


When the bread had gotten a nice brown crisp on, I served it all on plates, topping it with fresh Romaine, cherry tomatoes and slices of avocado. Dribbled just a tad of balsamic vinaigrette over the whole schmear and sat down to the perfect meal for a day on the cusp between spring and summer.


Who says we can't have it all?