Three salads - Beetroot, fennel, blood orange with tahini and carob molasses dressing - Red chicory, Roquefort, hazelnuts with Sriracha vinaigrette - Fennel, orange, Greek olives
The ultimate salad trio
Three simple winter salads full of color, pizazz and flavors that work together like magic.
The Greek element is present in all three even though none of them are Greek per se. Greek ingredients always find their way into my cooking, even the simplest kind. Sometimes it may be just the fact that I will stubbornly use extra virgin olive oil in Asian dishes or crumble some feta on top of a Mexican-inspired chilli. Don’t we all do that, though? Add our own personal touch to everything we cook to make it more familiar? Do you do that?
The first salad:
Red chicory, bitter and crunchy.
Roquefort cheese, pungent and salty.
Hazelnuts, toasty and nutty.
Chervil, delicate and fresh.
What a foursome this is. Paired with a fiery (as much or as little as you prefer) vinaigrette made with Sriracha chilli sauce, Greek thyme honey and cider vinegar, it is so delicious I almost dunk my whole sourdough bread into it before the vinaigrette even touched the salad.
The second salad:
Inspired by Italy and our trip to Amalfi a couple of years ago where we met an enthusiastic, food-obsessed Sicilian man while waiting in line to get ice cream, and we started chatting salads. He went on and on about one made with fennel, oranges and olives which intrigued me. He said Sicilian olives should always be used, but I am from Greece, so of course I’m going to use Greek olives and Greek olive oil, which I truly believe is the best in the world.
Last but certainly not least, the third salad. The one to end all salads:
The beetroot, fennel and blood orange salad with tahini and carob molasses dressing.
This salad blows my mind every time I eat it (I get that way about salads, hence the conversation with the Italian man in Amalfi), and it is a feast for the eyes, too, with that ridiculously beautiful color of the blood oranges, blowing you away before you even had the chance to taste it.
The true magic, though, lies in the dressing, which is complex, rich and unbelievably tasty, with acidic, slightly bitter and dark caramel notes from the carob molasses, citrusy sweetness from the blood orange and deeply nutty flavors from the tahini (I used a roasted tahini that was remarkable).
All three salads can speak for themselves. They are the sum of their parts and are as delicious as the ingredients used.
The combination of flavors is what makes them unique and simple at the same time.
All three are worthy of a place at your dinner table, in your lunchbox for work, alongside other nibbles at a gathering, bbq or picnic (Spring is coming, I promise!).
Enjoy!
Also, more blood orange recipes because you need to make the most of them while you can:
Chewy meringues with Greek yoghurt, blood oranges & blood orange and orange-blossom water syrup
Spelt waffles with pistachios and a blood orange and orange-blossom water syrup
Blood orange granita with juniper berries and Dutch Jenever (gin)
And beetroot recipes because, well, a dish is always good when there’s beetroot involved:
Dark chocolate beetroot brownies - you can’t tell there’s beetroot in them, trust!
Lastly, for those of you observing Lent, you can find all my Lenten recipes here.
Have a great weekend!
