Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here!
Today, I’m sharing another selection from the delicious food we enjoyed on our recent trip to Napa. On the way home from our brief visit, we decided to drop into a great little bistro for lunch. It is a venerable Napa Valley institution serving up some of the freshest, tastiest fare in the Valley for decades. They grow their own greens right on the premises and the food is always of-the-moment–delicious and imaginative. There are daily specials and a few items that are perennials, including a salad made of greens, spiced pistachios, blue cheese crumbles and an absolutely decadent dressing:
I licked my plate clean. It was simple, elegant and yet decadent all at the same time.
I have the restaurant’s cookbook, and it’s quite good, although most of the recipes I’ve tried from it are a bit more ambitious than I usually want to tackle on an average Tuesday night, if you know what I mean.
In it, I found what I believe is the dressing for this salad. It has a lot of ingredients–and I mean A LOT of ingredients. Since the salad ingredients are pretty straightforward, I decided that I wanted to try to re-create it, but in a format suitable for weeknight dining in a home kitchen setting.
This fresh greens salad with pistachios and blue cheese vinaigrette consists of several different kinds of lettuce–I know one of them was endive and another was (I think) butter lettuce.
What I had in my fridge was a bag of mixed hearts of romaine and butter lettuces. I found endive at my local grocery store and since Northern California is country’s largest producer of pistachios, I almost always have a bag of them on hand. I was off to the races. All I needed to do was to come up with a tasty, but less complicated, duplicate for the dressing.
Enter my basic vinaigrette.
I always make a batch of vinaigrette at the beginning of the week and keep it handy all week for quick salads. For this dressing, I used about a half a cup of the vinaigrette and added about a tablespoon of mayonnaise and about a tablespoon of blue cheese, which I mashed up to create a paste. I whisked the whole thing together, covered it and put it back in the fridge to let the flavors meld a little.
In the meantime, I toasted the pistachios with a little oil ( just enough to make them a little shiny and to provide a binder for some seasonings–I used a southwestern seasoning blend, but almost any blend that included a little chili pepper spice to give a bit of a bite would do).
Once the pistachios were toasted and cooled, I put the lettuces and pistachios into a serving bowl and tossed with the dressing for a salad that was every bit as good as the restaurant version, but geared to the home cook. And what’s the best news? It took mere minutes to put together!
I hope you enjoy this salad with your next dinner–it would even be right at home on your Thanksgiving table alongside the turkey, dressing and candied yams!
Tune in tomorrow when I share a new recipe for kabocha squash–
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
