The hero of late autumn, in another recipe – tangy apple and bitey fennel match together to create the perfect light side dish along the heavy roasts of holiday meals!
A salad is the perfect ease-into-huge-meal dish, and a sweet/sour salad like this will be a perfect match against all of the heavy, buttery, roasted, holiday meal classics. Long ago, my mom discovered this recipe thanks to a CSA (Community supported agriculture) box that we subscribed to. If my memory is correct, we took this particular box to visit family in Idaho along with all the recipes, and for the first year ever had dishes outside of the classic standards of my family’s Christmas/Thanksgiving meal.
If you have a mandoline slicer, get it at the ready. This recipe requires not even a recipe card. It is that simple. Take two green apples, slice them with the mandoline nice and thin, take your fennel bulb and slice it as well. Place all of this into a bowl. Add a handful of chopped walnuts (or chopped hazlenuts, as I did this year). And make the dressing.
To dress: 1 Tbsp of honey, 1 and 3/4 Tbsp of apple cider vinegar, 2 Tbsp of olive oil, and whisk! Pour this over the apple and fennel, toss the salad, and only before you are ready to serve, add a small pinch of salt. (Salt removes moisture, so only do this truly once ready to serve. Otherwise your salad will sit in a pool of liquid. Unsightly!)
How easy is that? You can whip that up in the morning, dress it just before the meal, and have it on the table in 2 minutes. Amazing. It will make your day so much easier and your meal spread much more colorful. Like this:
Sans Estomac 
This looks delicious!
LikeLike