Mandoline salad with honey lemon dressing

March 19, 2015 Published by Dina

I call this a mandolin salad because I slice most of the veggies that go into it on a mandoline type slicer. It doesn’t have to be a fancy one, the small plastic gadgets that are readily available work just fine. You can use a knife, but unless you have very good knife skills, I suggest you use a mandoline. I vary the dressings from olive oil and vinegar to sweet and tangy to nut oil vinaigrettes. Sometimes I sprinkle it with nuts, toasted or caramelized, and sometimes I add thinly sliced fruits such as apples or pears. Shaved hard cheese, goat cheese and even gorgonzola make an appearance now and then, depending on the salad greens. Once you get the concept, the sky is the limit.

Today I saw a similar salad on Saveur magazine and the dressing they suggested appealed to me, but I was missing a major ingredient. Saveur’s salad relies heavily on a pepper spice called aleppo pepper (they called for 2 tbs to be put into the dressing) and that would have made the salad completely different than what I ended up making, but I don’t have that pepper and have never used it before. It’s on my list to try. Without the pepper the dressing is a little on the sweet side so you can adjust it, perhaps add a little more lemon juice.

Saveur called their salad shaved cauliflower and radicchio but clearly you can use whatever you have on hand. I happened to have a lot of radishes in the fridge today: black radishes, watermelon radishes, white radishes, deep purple and red ones and regular radishes as well. I made a crisp and colourful salad from whatever I had: cauliflower, red cabbage, green cabbage, snow peas, brussels sprouts, celery, green onion, a little of each of the exotic radishes and tying it all together, torn baby curly endive. The dressing as I made it was sweet and tangy and went well with the salad. I sprinkled the salad with chopped buttery pistachios but left the golden raisin they suggested out.

The thing with salad recipes is that quantities are approximate. Slice or chop enough of each of the ingredients to come up with the amount of salad you need for the number of people you are serving.


 

Ingredients:


Cut enough of the following vegetables to have about 4 cups:

Green cabbage, sliced on a mandoline
Red cabbage, sliced on a mandoline
2 stalks celery cut on the diagonal
Cauliflower, sliced thinly, at least some on a mandolin
Snow peas, sliced diagonally with a knife
Brussels sprouts, sliced on a mandoline
3Green onion, sliced diagonally with a knife
Large radishes: black, watermelon, white and whatever other type you have, or just use regular radishes, sliced on a mandoline

1/3 cup chopped pistachios


 

Honey Lemon Dressing:


1/3 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons orange juice
1/4 cup honey
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt


 

Directions:


Mix all the vegetables in a salad bowl.

Combine the dressing ingredients and mix well

To serve: drizzle some of the dressing over the vegetables, pile onto salad plates.

Sprinkle each plate with the chopped pistachios.

Serve with fleur de sel and additional dressing on the side.


Mandoline salad with honey lemon dressing

Mandoline salad with honey lemon dressing



 

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