My recent trip to Spring Green reminded of an early date with my then-girlfriend, later wife, then ex-wife but now wife-in-the-eyes-of-the-Lord.
I made a picnic lunch and we stopped in a small cemetery in a place called Epernay Valley near Spring Green which a Google search tells me stopped existing in 1976. And ate our lunch sitting against a tombstone.
In any event, the lunch I made was ham salad sandwiches and the sauce was ketchup, green pepper, onion and horseradish. I loved, loved loved it and have remembered the taste of that all of these years and finally, reminded by my trip to Spring Green last week, decided to make shrimp salad with it. (It really is a mystery to me how I happen to retain this sort of useless incidental information.)
The salad was GREAT and I served it with watermelon feta salad that was also excellent.
I’ve put the recipe below but I’m really uncertain of the proportions so if you make it do what feels right (that seems so unhelpful). I’ll have to make it again and keep track of what I’m doing. That’ll be the day.
Shrimp Cocktail Salad
1/2 pound of cooked penne or smallish pasta. I rinsed mine in cold water and immediately tossed it with 2 TBS of mayonnaise to keep it from clumping.
20 large shrimp cooked and cut in half top to tailwise. I’d say this was about 2 cups.
1/2 cup chopped red pepper same of green and yellow
1/4 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped celery
Sauce
2 TBS finely chopped green pepper
2 TBS finely chopped onion
2 TBS horseradish (I used jarred prepared horseradish)
2 TBS capers
1/4 cup ketchup
1/4 mayonnaise
Probably salt and pepper
Toss everything together and chill the hell out of it. Mine was a little sticky and thinned it out with caper juice which also cut the sweetness of the ketchup.