Two weeks into nice weather and dining on the front porch and this salad is already poised to be The Salad of 2012. A version of this salad was originally introduced to me by way of the first dinner Captain Graybeard, Esquire ever made for me. Since that night, it totally fell off the radar of amazingly delicious salads, only to be revived by sheer coincidence when all the ingredients were staring at me from the refrigerator right as I was having a moment of nostalgia. In any case, it is back and better than ever due to my new-found love of all cheese bleu.

I don’t know how to write a salad recipe in a way that isn’t insulting to everyone’s intelligence, particularly in light of the fact that I did not make the dressing (raspberry vinaigrette) from scratch. If this were a real cooking blog I would set out the instructions in a way that implies that the addition of each ingredient in a particular order and way is of critical importance to the outcome of the salad. Something like: “Toss the sliced strawberries with the salad greens. Slowly add bleu cheese crumbles.” I don’t know if the authors of those recipes really believe that it matters, or if they don’t have the balls to just say “It’s a fucking salad” after they list the ingredients. (Dibs on naming a cooking blog “It’s a Fucking Salad”). Instead, my only instruction is that you watch Graybeard like a hawk while he cooks the flank steak on the grill, because if you’re only going to consume red meat once a week you sure as hell don’t want to waste your time on anything that isn’t perfectly seared on the outside and rare in the middle.

And just like that, you now have my Salad of 2012 recipe.