Tomato Mozzarella salad

I am avoiding a paper, and by doing such, noticed that other's neglect gives me ample opportunity to win this particular challenge.

So let's talk salad for a moment. An important pronciple I learned from the French is that salad does not always mean lettuce and dressing. In fact, since salad really just refers to the blending of various fresh things, it doesn't even necesarily have to refer to vegetables at all, meaning fruit salad could simply be referred to as salad, and if you wanted to, say, create a salad using pudding and cookies, it could simply be referred to as a salad as well. Although I don't know anyone who would do such a thing, and if they did, there would be GREAT debates as to whether it counted as a salad or as a dessert.

But I digress. My favorite salad from France is one I had my very first week there, and many many times after.

You will need:
Tomatoes (Roma work really well for this)
Mozzarella (I like to get the fresh kind, packed in water, for this, since its more of a feature of the dish than just grating it over the top)
A vinaigrette. You can use a pre-mixed kind, but if you want to make a really nice one, I will give you the recipe for that as well.
You can add fresh basil as well. It brings the flavors together quite nicely.

Slice the tomatoes and the mozzarella so that the slices are basically the same size (and if you got the fresh mozzarella in the round packages, then they are nice and uniform!) Layer them out on a plate, in a pretty pattern, alternating between the tomato and mozzarella. Drizzle with the vinaigrette and the chopped fresh basil and some salt and pepper.

Yup, thats all there is to a marvelous salad. I might add that if you are particularly wealthy or trying to impress someone, Havarti cheese works well too.

And, I might add again, that its in our blood, in our own heritage to love this salad. After all, how many times did we have tomatoes and cheese for lunch at Grandma and Grandpa Pratt's house? Remember how you could just pick a tomato and eat it like an apple, catching the juice dribbles with that unreasonably large hunk of yellow cheese that Grandma would cut for you? This is simply less portable and less messy.