I'm not sure how traditional this salad is, but I grew up eating this Vietnamese steak and watercress salad. It's a colorful salad with tomatoes and eggs, but the star of the dish is the stir-fried beef and onions. It's a great combination of savory and sweet.

The marinade for the beef is commonly used in Viet stir-fries. It's just a simple mix of fish sauce, soy, sugar and black pepper. As a kid, my mom would lightly dress the watercress in a vinaigrette. This time, we dribbled a little nuoc cham (Viet dipping sauce) over it. It's good either way.

The salad is delicious on its own, but we like to eat it with jasmine rice. Give it a try the next time you want a salad as a meal.

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We rarely participate in blogging events, but when I recently learned about Barbara's LIVESTRONG With A Taste of Yellow event, I knew we had to make something yellow for LIVESTRONG day (May 13th). As an avid cyclist, I'm a Lance Armstrong fan, but I'm a bigger fan of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which provides survivorship services for people affected by cancer.

Over the years, I've had a few friends battle and survive cancer. And I've had a few relatives lose the fight. For the last four years, I've worn a LIVESTRONG bracelet every single day in support of people living with cancer and each year, I make a donation to the LAF. I know it's not much relative to the funding required to fight cancer, but every penny counts. So if you have the means, please make a contribution to the Lance Armstrong Foundation. It's a wonderful charity with a great cause.

For our yellow food, Hungry Bear and I made a spicy fresh corn salad. It's a simple salad made with corn, red onions, basil and a vinaigrette. For a spicy kick, I threw in a few Thai chili peppers. We usually make this salad with sweet white corn, but this time we obviously used yellow corn for the Taste of Yellow event. Either way, the corn salad is really delicious. It's a light, refreshing salad that's perfect for a picnic/BBQ or a hot summer day.

Now for true inspiration about fighting cancer, check out Use Real Butter by Jen Yu. She's one of my absolute favorite food bloggers with a great wit, a never-quit attitude and of course fabulous food!

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We recently went to Ubuntu in downtown Napa, which is one of the hot new dining spots in wine country. Ubuntu is a vegetable restaurant and yoga studio. What can I say, we're in California. The yoga classes are held upstairs, but you have to walk through the restaurant to get to the studio. Imagine clearing your mind and body with some yoga, and then walking downstairs to dine on daily-harvested organic food, with a focus on farm-fresh produce. Brilliant!

We really like the fact Ubuntu labels itself as a vegetable restaurant and not a vegetarian place. Unlike many vegetarian places that try to make vegetables into meat substitutes, Ubuntu simple celebrates the beauty of the vegetable itself. We've dined at Greens and Millennium, two vegetarian restaurants in San Francisco, and walked away unimpressed. Ubuntu on other hand left us wanting to come back for more. Two of the highlights of our meal were...

• Cauliflower in a cast iron pot
  roast-puree-“couscous”, vadouvan spice, toast
  
• Chickpeas with burrata
  olive vinaigrette, pepper quenelles with mint and bread crumbs

Both dishes were delicious and I was taking notes with each bite, knowing that I wanted to try to recreate them at home. We were impressed by the presentation of the chickpea salad, especially the beautiful red quenelles of pepper puree. The crunchiness of the breadcrumbs in the puree was a surprise. We were expecting them to be a little soggy since they were mixed in with the puree, but somehow they remained crispy.

So earlier this week, we recreated the chickpeas with burrata at home. There were two main components to the chickpea salad — a lemon-mint vinaigrette and a roasted red bell pepper puree. Both the vinaigrette and puree were easy to make. Roasting the bell peppers was a little time consuming, but the process was still simple. The hard part was figuring out how to make the crunchy breadcrumbs. To keep the prep time down in the recipe, we substituted crushed baked pita chips for the homemade breadcrumbs, a quick and easy solution that provided the desired texture.

Hungry Bear and I were extremely happy with our chickpea salad recreation. The quenelles of roasted red pepper puree were fantastic on their own. Add them to a minty chickpea salad with mozzarella cheese and you have a great starter course or even a complete meal. We were hesitant to splurge on burrata cheese the first time we attempted to make this dish, but next time we will definitely use it for the extra creaminess and flavor.

We don't know if we were able to exactly duplicate Ubuntu's chickpeas with burrata dish. But we do know that our version of the chickpea salad was pretty damn good!

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I present to you Hungry Bear's ginormous fruit salad. On Thanksgiving, we had the latest version of her giant fruit salad with cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon, pineapple, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, kiwis, persimmons and mandarin oranges. The fruit selection is usually seasonal, but we are fortunate to get good fruit year round in San Francisco.

Similar to Hungry Bear's Chinese sticky rice, the mega fruit salad is a featured item at our holiday feasts. You maybe asking, "Is it really that big?" Yes, the fruit salad is humongous. We actually weighed it this time and the fruit came in at 20 lbs! The bowl is 6.5 inches deep and has a diameter of 14 inches. That's a lot of fruit capacity... 3.1 gallons!

Why is there so much fruit salad? I often ask this question myself. It's not like she's feeding a football team. At most, there are 15 people at our largest gatherings, with plenty of other food and desserts. The reason why there is so much fruit starts with Hungry Bear's refusal to buy half a melon because it's not as fresh. She typically begins with a whole cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon and pineapple, which is a lot of fruit. Next, to balance the flavors (sweet versus tart) and colors, a lot of berries and tropical fruit are required, which yields a 20 lb fruit salad.

Hungry Bear's love for leftovers is the ultimate reason why all dishes are bear-sized, i.e. quadrupled. On Thanksgiving, the fruit salad was a huge hit as always. It was very refreshing after a heavy meal and a great interlude before the apple, pumpkin and pecan pies. We had a ton of leftover fruit and everyone was more than happy to take some home.

Now you have the story of Hungry Bear's ginormous fruit salad!

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