Winter Salads.

Salad construction in the spring and summer is a no brainer when you have a variety of fresh greens, tomatoes, herbs in your garden or farmers markets. I love the bigger challenge of constructing winter salads and try to use the seasonal things in the fridge and pantry. Toasted nuts- walnuts, almonds, pistachios, candied pecans are frequent additions at the last minute. Fuyu persimmon, grapefruit sections, pomegranate arils, roasted chestnuts, crisp pears, dried fruits - cranberries, cherries blueberries, figs +/- rehydration in an interesting vinegar or fruit liqueur also make appearance. Sometimes fruit alone like horizontally sliced oranges - blood, cara cara, naval dressed with thinly sliced red onion or shaved fennel. The mandoline comes out for shaving red cabbage, green cabbage, brussels sprouts, fennel, celery to supplement the greens that look the freshest at the grocery. Bitter greens favored. Now is the time to play around with interesting herb flavored vinegars put up in the fall mostly with unseasoned rice vinegar, Sherry vinegar or simply lemon or lime juice and nut oils. I especially like the Stony Brook butternut squash seed oil. https://store.wholeheartedfoods.com/pro ... -seed-oil/
Shaved hard cheeses at the last minute. Parm, manchego or soft cheeses - blues, marinated goat, burrata
Shaved Serrano ham or prosciutto for dinner salads. Leftover chicken, ham, beef steak for lunch salads.
Don't often use tomatoes in winter salads but lots of avocados.
I tend to tailor summer salads to the main by featuring different dressings. In winter it's the combination of ingredients chosen to pair with the main then the dressing.
Do you have any favorite go to winter salads ?

[Jenise]

I'm a die-hard salad lover, so our meals are peppered with them. At least one per day, and often more. It's my natural proclivity, and additionally my husband has a new medical need for two servings per day of dark greens. Seasonality makes a difference, but I don't find winter any less interesting than summer--just different.

Among greens, iceberg lettuce, which I do not hate, is better at this time of year than any other--smaller, sweeter, leafier heads, perfect for wedgies or a mixed salad of, say, avocado, oregano, garlic, cilantro, oil & vinegar. Escarole's better at this time of year, too. So are radishes. And lucky us, we have a local farmer who's in love with chicory and this year is growing many different beautiful, colorful kinds, which we're able to buy at our local Food Co-op.

A lot of my salads involve marinating things like thin slices of rutabega or jerusalem artichokes to mix later sliced raw mushrooms and watercress. Or slices of cauliflower get marinated to be combined with chunks of bread and whatever else strikes my fancy (chicory!) for what we call 'winter panzanella'.

Like you, Christina, I take advantage of winter citruses. Someone just brought me a bag of meyer lemons he picked in San Francisco last week, so on today's lunch menu is going to be a warm first course salad of blanched broccoli rabe liberally doused with sweet lemon juice, EVOO and feta cheese.

Speaking of warm salads: beet greens excel, treated like above. So does cabbage wok-wilted with oil & vinegar and then topped with grated cheddar cheese on the plate.

Something relatively new in our world is baby kale, which is tender enough to make a great salad ingredient. Bob even gets them stuffed into grilled cheese sandwiches with pickled peppers for a side hustle on flavor, which he actually loves. (I would love it too, but I'm avoiding carbs at the moment.)

Basically, I make more salad in more varieties than anyone else I know. I am surrounded by people who live in a world of two lettuces and three bottled salad dressings (Italian, Blue Cheese and Creamy Caesar). They eat salad because they think they should, but their self-imposed ignorance creates boredom. For excitement they add bacon bits that come in a jar. My salads scare them.

Whereas here at Chez J, our only limitation is my dislike for creamy salad dressings. Pretty much, if it's not clear I don't eat it. But thanks to herbs, nuts and cheeses, the world of oils and vinegars has infinite possibilities. Brines and oils from pickled peppers and preserved vegetables all get second lives as salad ingredients. Nothing's off the table.

Do you have any favorite go to winter salads ?

Red cabbage salad (also known as 'slaw') is a staple for us. Adds great color and crunch. I usually make the dressing with some combination of soy sauce and the various vinegars on hand.

Grated carrot salad/slaw is another favorite that peaks in the winter. This is more likely to be flavored with some form of vinaigrette. It's also my son's favorite vegetable form, so he gets it once a day!

Otherwise, green salads are always nice and easy and a definite year-round staple. But I don't like adding too many things to my salads. Just enjoying the beautiful lettuce we get from the market. Maybe sometimes radishes or avocado, but would often prefer to use the latter for guacamole.

Grated carrot salad... yum!

And now you've got me wanting iceberg.

[Jenise]

Grated carrot salad--love to make them now. But it reminds me that when I was a kid, one of the most popular take-out salads, right up there with potato salad and cole slaw and available in virtually every supermarket deli in Southern California, was grated carrot and regular raisins in some kind of white dressing. It has disappeared from the planet.

I love the Central Asian Koryo Salad. Spicy with cumin and coriander and hot with chile. It was a revelation when my Russian friend first made it.

...grated carrot and regular raisins in some kind of white dressing. It has disappeared from the planet.

Yes. I wonder if the dressing had yogurt? Or maybe mayonnaise, but not very much. That was also a staple of my mother's food when I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s. Haven't seen it in years/decades!

...grated carrot and regular raisins in some kind of white dressing. It has disappeared from the planet.

Yes. I wonder if the dressing had yogurt? Or maybe mayonnaise, but not very much. That was also a staple of my mother's food when I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s. Haven't seen it in years/decades!

It was most likely mayonnaise, especially during that era.

I enjoy carrot salads, too. Mostly, our lunchtime salad version will just be grated carrot tossed with grated cheese, or grated carrot tossed with a handful of currants ... and people choose their own salad dressing at the table. Recently, though, a friend who has prided himself on claiming "I never cook" turned up at a gathering with a delicious carrot salad flavoured with soy sauce and all sorts of interesting nuances. I must ask him for the recipe.

...grated carrot and regular raisins in some kind of white dressing. It has disappeared from the planet.

Yes. I wonder if the dressing had yogurt? Or maybe mayonnaise, but not very much. That was also a staple of my mother's food when I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s. Haven't seen it in years/decades!

T:he dressing was definitely mayonnaise-based. It was very similar to, if not identical to, the dressing for coleslaw. I was a very fussy eater as a kid and mayo was on the hate list, so I never ate the shredded carrot-and-raisin salad even though I loved raw carrots. I used to ask my mother for a peeled, whole carrot whenever a Bugs Bunny cartoon came on TV. I would take a nibble every time Bugs did. I could never figure out why I always ran out of carrot halfway through the cartoon.

-Paul W.

I used to ask my mother for a peeled, whole carrot whenever a Bugs Bunny cartoon came on TV. I would take a nibble every time Bugs did. I could never figure out why I always ran out of carrot halfway through the cartoon.-Paul W.

I ate so many carrots when I was a kid, people would tease me about how I was going to turn orange. (And that was long before Trump.)

I liked them, too.