Wednesday 8 July 2009

pear, walnut & rocket salad with classic salad dressing

So I finally made my first, actually two savoury recipes from 'In the Kitchen'. Thanks to Jo who invited a couple of the girls over for dinner on Sunday night, we were all requested to bring along a dish and a dessert. My dessert were the the flourless chocolate muffins I made in my last post. After careful deliberation (taking into account what the other girls were making, guessing what they were making, time constraints and ingredients I had at home), for my 'dish', I ended up going with the pear, walnut & rocket salad from 'In the Kitchen' with the classic salad dressing.

The dressing took just a matter of minutes to whip up - a simple combo of dijon mustard, red wine vinegar, extra virgin olive oil as well as cracked salt + pepper to taste. Personally, I loved it and I had Jo's mum ask me for the recipe.

To make one bowl of salad (which ended up decently serving 7), combine rocket (in my case, I used Italian mix), parmesan, toasted walnuts and sliced pear. I was worried that the dressing would make the salad soggy and brought it over to Jo's place separately to add just before serving. Turns out you didn't really need to - with the extra ingredients I made the salad again to bring to lunch today and I added the dressing straight away. By lunchtime, the salad was still fine.
The finished salad.

As strange as it sounds, the toasted walnuts in this salad are addictive. I never thought I was a big fan of walnuts but I end up munching on them whilst they were toasting in the oven and even before they went into the salad. I daresay, strange things are happening and I'm getting old - things I never used to like I'm starting to like! Bitter gourd and walnuts are just the start!

4 comments:

Joanna said...

photos are here:

http://joannaleephotography.blogspot.com/2009/07/bring-dish-x-2.html

btw, mum liked the idea of adding the walnuts -> she ended up munching all of them =P

a very fresh salad :) the pears were really good!

Betty @ The Hungry Girl said...

Lol. I'm so with you. So many things that I used to go yuck at, have now become favourites. Oh dear, what is going on?! Ahh. The salad sounds lovely though, I love pears in salad :)

Anonymous said...

I love crisp pears and they're give such a delicate crunch and sweetness in salads. Love the sound of this!

panda said...

jo - you are quick with your post! and i agree, this was a fresh salad and the walnuts and pears in it were fantastic!

betty - it's actually quite scary to see how my tastes have changed. but no loss though, it means we end up eating more :P give this salad a go, it's so easy to make

nqn - i think every salad needs a bit of texture in it and the pears in this one definitely did the job!