grilled carrot & pea shoot salad

most nights we sit down for dinner it falls into one of a few categories: just a meal to sustain us, but not the healthiest or greatest tasting; a meal of new techniques and flavors that’s tasty but needs improvement; or a meal that’s amazing and stays in our minds to be recreated just as is. this meal definitely took us by surprise, big time.

i’ve been lamenting that my snap peas haven’t produced a flower yet (woe is me!), and i am not sure if i’m just being impatient or if i have unknowingly needed to nurture it with something like fertilizer or pruning. instead of keeping the whining up, i decided to take a different route, and just try another part of the plant that we hadn’t known much about. i’ve seen pea shoots at the farmers market, and to be honest, i figured the only people who ate pea shoots were people who didn’t shave, or followed this ‘total-utilization’ mantra.

**here’s a little secret: while i will never stop shaving, wil and i are slowly but surely crawling into the camp of creatively using more parts of the plants god gave us. radish greens? check. pea shoots? check. carrot tops? to come!**

we already had a bunch of adorable, tasty looking spring carrots on hand, and thought with the nice weather, grilling them sounded interesting, and then tossing the charred carrots with the pea shoots and some lettuce, dressed lightly with a ponzu sauce. ponzu is a traditional japanese sauce, very basic in concept, usually consisting of equal parts of lemon/citrus juice and soy sauce.

the peas & carrots got the ball rolling, but the sauce brought it all together, and little did we know we had a dynamite combination on our hands. the sauce was tart and lemony but immediately felt balanced to the slight saltiness of the soy, and it complemented the sweetness of the vegetables perfectly. to complete the meal we grilled a couple thin ribeye steaks as well, and served those underneath the salad. we both just sat there during the dinner raving about how it was the best meal we’ve both had at home in who knows who long. we weren’t insulting our past meals, this one was just that good.

if pea shoots aren’t available to you, then my recommendation would be to at minimum grill your carrots next time. the ones that were a little too charred for the picture sat on a side plate prior to us eating, and i had to tell myself to stop eating them so wil could have some… they tasted like candy.

ponzu sauce

juice of 2 lemons (about 1/4 cup)
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 shallot, minced
1 stem green garlic, minced
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
the tiniest pinch ever of kosher salt and pepper

…….

salad

pea shoots
lettuces (mild, such as butter/bibb, to not overpower the sweet pea and carrot flavors)
grilled carrots, basted with ponzu while grilling
dressed in ponzu sauce