It is amazing to me that I haven’t yet shared this salad with you. Don’t you love unusual salads? Don’t you get a smidgen tired of serving the same salad over and over? How about when you look in your fridge and the green leaves shout out little to no inspiration?

I am always so happy to have a few good salad options. What to serve guests to tickle their palate, what salads make me come back for seconds, or cause me to skip dessert altogether. Salads that skip being a side and go straight to the center. This is one of those salads.

You grow up eating greens, you regularly serve the same leafy greens, your friends eat greens and so when you present an endive laden salad people are inevitably, wonderfully impressed. Then they taste it, and they too, opt to eat more salad and wave off dessert.

Other favorite salads of mine include pecan blue cheese and sizzling goat cheese. For a twist, you can insert lightly sugared walnuts in place of the toasted walnuts.

Walnut Pear Endive Salad
5 heads endive
1 cup walnut halves
3 T champagne vinegar
2 tsp Dijon mustard
1 room temperature egg yolk
KS&CP (kosher salt & coarse pepper)
1/2 cup plus 2 T olive oil
6 oz blue cheese crumbles
1 red pear, thinly sliced

Cut off end of each endive, separating leaves. Toss in bowl. Toast walnuts in skillet over medium until fragrant. Place vinegar, dijon, yolk, KS&CP and olive oil in JAR: Shake it all about. Combine dressing with endive leaves, add cheese, walnuts and pears on top or to blend.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Salads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.