Sunday 2 December 2012

Radicchio salad

Just recently we have been eating a lot of Radicchio, because the ones in my garden have been maturing. You can tell when they are ready to harvest when the big outer leaves go brown and shrivel up (or slimy if the weather is wet), leaving behind the tight, red heart. I have posted several photos of Radicchio, but to be honest they all look much the same, so I thought this time I would show you some Radicchio actually being used in the kitchen.

So here we are then - some of my Radicchio combined with beetroot, tomatoes and red onions to make a "Red Salad". Lots of nice colour, taste and texture.


To accompany the salad, Jane made our favourite one of our favourite salad dressings, which is a mustard vinaigrette enhanced with cream and Blue Cheese (in this case Danish Blue). It comes out pretty thick - more like a sauce than a dressing, but we like it that way. The trouble is, it doesn't look very elegant!


Just take it from me that it tastes a lot better than it looks, and it goes brilliantly with the Radicchio.

I also want to show you what I did with those chillis I wrote about on Friday. I made them into Chilli oil. I just boiled them up in some plain vegetable oil for a few minutes and then left them to infuse, before decanting the oil into a bottle. Actually, I must admit that I added to them one of the Scotch Bonnet chillis that had been hanging around in the fridge for a while (just to use it up, you understand...), which certainly pepped-up this oil a fair bit!


Because it is so hot, we will use this oil a few drops at a time, drizzled into a soup maybe, not in big spoonfuls for frying with.

9 comments:

  1. The salad looks delicious, and it doesn't matter what the dressing looks like, it's the taste that matters.

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  2. Yum, that beautiful red salad looks appealing!What a good crop of Radicchio you have. The pepper oil looks so pretty. What did you do with the peppers after decanting the oil, or did you just leave them in the oil bottle, too? Careful, now, about those hot oil drops...you may be blowing out fire like a dragon!

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  3. The dressing looks fine to me - just look a bit like mayonnnaise

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  4. Your salad looks wonderful and not a combination I would have thought of with the beets. (I have to just add them to my salad as Phil is a beet hater). The dressing looks very nice to me too. I never make anything with Blue Cheese because to me it tastes like mold but I did have some blue cheese dressing when I worked in a restaurant that I thought was very good. I really need to try using it.
    I love the idea of the chili oil. I too would like to know if you left the chillis in the oil or took them out.

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  5. Looks like a lovely salad. Thick dressing or not....

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  6. Since some of you asked: when I had finished making the oil I discarded the chillis. They had of course gone soft, so they were not particularly appetising more eating. I suppose you could leave a couple of them in the bottle, just for decoration. David: I expect you would have made them into a relish!

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  7. I think if you left the chillies in the oil it wouldn't last nearly as long - dried would be fine but fresh chillies could spoil in the oil. I must make some chilli oil this year - do you find you use it a lot?

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  8. That dressing looks delicious Mark as does the salad

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  9. The salad looks very nice indeed, I like the "redness". Must admit I haven't done any salads lately, (due to the colder weather and my Winter Lettuce being slow growing at the moment.

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