Summer Crudités salad with toasted cashews and lemony dressing recipe
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Sauces Gravy Dressings, Snacks Breakfast Lunch | 3 comments
Photo: summer salad
When I was a teenager my mother often took me and my sister to Paris for a month. It was always in August when a lot of Parisians are away from the city. Quite a few shops and restaurants were closed but the art galleries and the big shops were open and we generally found somewhere good to eat lunch. It was in one of those little left bank restaurants that I discovered the delight of Crudités – a plate of raw vegetables and aioli mayonnaise for dipping. The diffused light of the restaurant and clean tastes of the dish contrasted with the brightness and heat of the dusty Parisian streets. I still remember the shock of eating raw cauliflower, the crunch and texture and flavour combining perfectly with the thick aioli dip.
I had forgotten all about this treat until we harvested our fist home grown cauliflower. Sweet and delicate an angelic version of the tasteless supermarket cauliflowers. Last night Danny wanted Joanna’s courgette salad so I picked some soft salad leaves (Salad bowl – cut and come again) a small tight head of cauliflower and a couple of courgettes. We made a lemon, honey and olive oil dressing and toasted a handful of broken cashew nuts (half the price of pine nuts at the Daily Bread cooperative in Cambridge).
We fought over the last scraps from the salad bowl.
Leave a reply
Hello Domestic Executive
Yes, it’s the same with me. Loads of my holiday memories are plate shaped!
Hi Linda
We have had this salad almost every day since I posted it. We’re now seriously interested in growing salad leaves and ingredients all year round.
Oh. I’d almost forgotten how much I like raw cauliflower until I read this. Fresh taste and wonderful texture – your salad sounds wonderful.
Food memories during travel are the ones that linger longest with me. Doesn’t matter where we go there is always somewhere that sticks in my mind because of food.But I find I can never recapture that memory by replicating the food experience, no matter how hard I try. I guess it’s all part of the sense of place, occasion and experience that makes it a memory that sticks in the first place.