Apple Walnut Salad with Rhubarb Compote Dressing

I’ve recently been obsessed by the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s essentially a year-in-the-life of a writer (who can forget the Poisonwood Bible?) and her family who decide to make eating local their priority. So they do what anyone who’s developed this itch would do: they move to Appalachian Virginia and consume only food they’ve grown themselves or has been grown by farmers within an hour’s drive. This miracle year took a stand against excessive fuel consumption, concentrated animal feeding operations, vegetable monocultures, and big business. Instead, it emphasized gratitude, respect, time with loved ones, and the deliciousness of fresh foods.

Along similar lines, the New York Times has an article today in the Dining Out section about restaurants returning to tap water rather than offering bottled. It’s been over 2500 years since the Romans built viaducts and aqueducts (so gorgeous) and in our one-upmanship for purity and “safety” many of us feel more at ease with the packaged “seal of freshness” and portability of bottled water rather than having to old-school our potables from the tap and a, gasp, reusable container we have to wash ourselves. (Depending on the quality of your local water supply you may want to get a filter too.) Thus the local food movement has moved to include beverages as well.

This salad is a little hat-tip to Ms. Kingsolver and her very laudable undertaking of eating local. It was topping off around 90 degrees this weekend in Brooklyn and all I really wanted was something green, crunchy and fresh. But I wanted something with fruit… which brings up one of the most dire problems for locavores; until late summer and fall, most fruit - unless you live in Florida or California - is far from local. The only fruit choices for me at NYC’s well-stocked Union Square Greenmarket this late May weekend were last year’s apples (still crunchy and juicy - some apples improve during storage.) In her book, Kingsolver ameliorated a late-spring fruit craving with rhubarb and if it’s good enough for her it’s good enough for me. Sautéed with unrefined sugar and balsamic vinegar, rhubarb makes a great dressing for this local salad.

Serves: 2
Time: 30 minutes

1/4 cup of walnuts, chopped (substitute local nuts if you’ve got em)
olive oil
2 very long stalks of rhubarb, sliced
1 tsp unrefined sugar or honey
1/8 tsp salt
1.5 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
a few handfuls of spring greens
2 apples, cut into matchsticks – I used the Mutsu variety
6 radishes, cut into coins

Dry-roast your nuts in a small saucepan. Set aside.

Add a pour of olive oil and sauté the sliced rhubarb for about 5 minutes. Add the sugar, salt, balsamic vinegar and another pour of olive oil and sauté a few more minutes or until the rhubarb starts to soften and lose it’s juice.

Assemble the salad with greens on the bottom, then the apples and radishes, spooning the rhubarb and the juices on top. Sprinkle with walnuts. I could also heartily endorse a local crumbly blue or goat cheese on top.
This is my entry to the very cool food event Salad Stravaganza hosted by La Mia Cucina. Also, even though I blog veggie every week, I thought I’d submit this to Eat the Right Stuff’s first blogging event, vegetables, beautiful vegetables. What a great choice for a first event!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Salads, Spring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.