Carrot Ribbon Salad

I am a big fan of carrots, and I am a big fan of salad, but I could never figure out how to combine them in a satisfying way. Cutting the carrots into round slices just made them too thick and woody in comparison with the lettuce, and shredded carrots tend to clump up unattractively. But, when I was peeling carrots, I realized that the peels were the perfect thickness for a salad. So I just kept peeling, even after the skin was long gone, to make carrot ribbons.

I used 2 carrots to get about 1-1.5cups of loosely packed ribbons (I would use a third carrot if I made this again). To continue my salad, I decided to add a small handful of cranberries and toasted pecans to add a bit of interest, and I topped it with a box of spring greens.

For the dressing, I made a mustard vinaigrette with a large spoonful of mustard, a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar, a larger spoonful of red wine vinegar (too much balsamic makes a salad cloyingly sweet instead of light and refreshing), an equal amount of olive oil, and a crank of freshly ground pepper.

I brought this salad to a Track pasta feed (where we feast on carbs the night before a race) and it was a nice change from all of the pasta and cookies. At the pasta feed, my friend and I actually ended up making a lemon-olive oil dressing with the hosts home-grown lemons for some of the plain pasta people had brought, and it was delicious: lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper, mustard, and "italian seasoning" tossed with pasta.