Grilled Steak Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing
Grilled Steak Salad tops crisp romaine with sliced flank steak, charred corn, avocado, and pickled onions, all finished with a creamy blue cheese dressing.
There is a category of salad that exists mainly to make you feel virtuous, and then there is steak salad with blue cheese dressing. This one is not pretending. A properly grilled steak brings char, rendered fat, and warm juices to a bowl of crisp greens, while blue cheese dressing supplies the salty, tangy punch that would completely bully a more delicate protein. The temperature contrast is part of the appeal. Let the steak rest so it keeps its juices, then slice it across the grain and lay it over cold vegetables just before serving. That gives you warm beef against crisp greens without wilting the whole bowl into surrender. Blue cheese should taste assertive, not timid, so the dressing needs enough acidity to cut through its richness and enough body to cling rather than pool at the bottom.
This is dinner disguised as salad, which is a much better arrangement than salad disguised as dinner. You still get freshness and crunch, but nobody is standing in front of the pantry 40 minutes later eating crackers directly from the sleeve because lunch turned out to be decorative.
