Hello everyone!

As always, I hope that your week has gone well. Today we have another incredible recipe that was discovered earlier this week. A couple of days ago, my mom had cooked up a delicious pasta with meatsauce dish. She complemented it with a salad that I hadn’t really seen before, but, as you may have guessed, it is the focus of this blog post today.

Let’s start with the recipe this time. You might notice that it has certain ingredients that you might not’ve seen before, but that’s the whole point!

3 cups radicchio lettuce
1 cup endive lettuce
Candied pecans or walnuts (approximately 2/3 cup)
Roasted delicata squash (seasoned with olive oil, salt and pepper)
Pomegranate seeds (for garnish)
Dill (for garnish)

Citrus vinaigrette (we used this one):
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 1/2 T. apple cider vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoons honey
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

For starters, I really wouldn’t say that this salad belongs to any one specific cuisine. That’s what’s fantastic about it. It has a delicious combo base of the radicchio and endive lettuce. The softer radicchio soaks up a lot of the vinaigrette, giving it a lot of flavor. On the other hand, the sturdier, almost scratchy (in a good way, I assure), endive lettuce gives you a very unique, but balanced texture. We used candied pecans, but from our past experiences using candied walnuts, I can say that it doesn’t really matter too much which one you mix in. Both of them add the “crunch” element to the salad and on top of that, their buttery-sweet flavor will have certainly having you wanting more. The delicata squash not only looks perfect in its bright yellow, but additionally, through its simple flavor and soft texture, acts as secondary glue or “balancer” for the dish. To top things off, you really can’t go wrong with sweet, juicy pomegranates on a salad like this, and the dill adds a nice herbal touch. The vinaigrette, as it should, pulls everything together and enhances all the ingredients further, all while still giving you an absolutely stunning mix of sweet and tangy flavors. In addition, the endive lettuce could actually be considered a little bitter and so while I’m generally not a big fan of such foods, in a vibrant, light salad like this, flowing with exceptionally powerful toppings, it really does work.

All in all, I really enjoy this salad. And I think that you will, too. Its balance of ingredients is quite incredible. It doesn’t really fill you up that much, making it a perfect, colorful side for dinner, and like I mentioned at the beginning, it kind of goes with anything!

That’s it for today! With that, I hope you all are staying positive, staying healthy, and I hope that this week will be fabulous.

Nate