Good idea: Eating salads every day.
Bad idea: The salad only being lettuce.
Here in France I'm impressed that they get their greens every day but a bit disappointed 'salad' refers to just lettuce, or in the cold months, yummier nutty, buttery 'mache'*
To me, salad implies a mixture of things. A chopped apple isn't a fruit salad by itself, is it? I guess in New Zealand we're used to eating lots of different salads, often as side dish, sometimes as a meal on their own. The French have a salad (lettuce) course, which I commend but intend to enhance!
So here's my first offering, that yummy mache (or your substitute like baby spinach, beet greens etc) paired with salad-in-its-own-right combo of fennel and orange. I like the last two ingredients fresh as a salad/desert in summer but as its winter (and I have a little extra time on my hands) I've been grilling the fennel (you could do this on the BBQ in summer). It's incredible how the flavour changes - it mellows and becomes ever more sweet, much like garlic does when you roast it. Of course, it has its own flavour which I love and, best of all, grilling them takes almost no oil and is quick.
Ingredients:
1 large orange
1/2 bulb of fennel
2 handfuls of mache or baby spinach / other salad greens
3 sprigs of fresh mint
2 t balsamic vinegar
2 T extra virgin olive oil
pinch sea salt
black pepper to taste
Method:
- Wash mache / greens (in sink or bowl of cold water to remove sandy grit). Remove to colander or salad spinner to drain. Rinse and slice mint and add to the mache/greens.
- Remove tough outer leaves of fennel bulb and discard. Chop fennel into slices. Grill on a very lightly oiled grill (or put on a tray and use oven grill with door ajar). They don't need to be heaps grilled, just to get a little colour / a couple of grill lines.
- While fennel is grilling, peel orange (slice off peel to avoid bitter pith), and chop into disks and then segments and put in a salad bowl. Squeeze in any extra juice from peel.
- Add to the salad bowl the vinegar, olive oil, salt and a good few grinds of pepper. Mix.
- Add the fennel and when ready to serve, the mache/greens. Mix leaves through the orange vinaigrette very gently. Mache and similar salad greens bruise easily and go soggy and look terrible if you leave them sitting in dressing for long.
I served this with a leek tart with homemade wholemeal pastry, very nice!
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