Day 167: fierce bitter crunch
After an indulgent (long) weekend in London - eating out wherever you want, and whatever you want, three times a day - a salad is a great way to start the week. OK, so it contains blue cheese, but it’s all about balance, right? Usually, when I have blue cheese, it either accompanies a big bowl of creamy garlic mushrooms and a few slices of (buttered) toasted sourdough, or, several other kinds of cheese and a few dozen crackers, so I still consider this salad the right kind of step into a better-balanced week. Day 167 is Nigella’s Nigella’s Radicchio, Chestnut and Blue Cheese Salad with a Citrus, Grain Mustard and Honey Dressing.
As you may or may not know, we were supposed to be holidaying in the USA right about now, but, for obvious reasons, that couldn’t happen. Every cloud does indeed have a silver lining, however, and we had a fabulous time holidaying and eating in London instead. Words cannot express my gratitude for a wonderful night at The River Café, followed by heavenly eating at Parsons Seafood Restaurant and The Darjeeling Express in Covent Garden, and at Noble Rot on Greek Street in Soho. You can see some of the gorgeous meals eaten during this trip on my 365 Days of Nigella Insta page (my phone doesn’t take the best pics in ambient lighting, by the way).
Nigella’s Radicchio, Chestnut and Blue Cheese Salad with a Citrus, Grain Mustard and Honey Dressing
I adore the bitterness of radicchio, but I appreciate it’s not to everyone’s taste. However, the citrus dressing here really does tone it down a touch; in fact, a forkful of everything together makes a perfectly balanced mouthful of fierce bitterness, tangy saltiness, earthy sweetness and sharp-sweet fruitiness. Two of us crunched our way greedily through the whole lot! And there’s a little drop of something in that dressing that really makes the whole thing sing!
I used stilton for my crumbly blue cheese and a kind of grain mustard that differs slightly from the semi-blitzed kind you see in most UK supermarkets; the grains are whole and are suspended, densely, in a viscous, vinegary plasma. I get it from the Polish shop. I don’t really know how to describe it!
You can find the recipe for this one in At My Table, p94. It is also available on the BBC Food Website.*
*Somebody kicked up a fuss on Twitter the other day, trying to prove they were right about something, when in fact they were not; they were just after something for free, embarrassed themselves and tried to turn it around on me. So, to be clear, here’s how it works: if the original recipe is available online, from an approved source, I will link to it with a button saying ‘Original recipe’. If it is not online, I will say “you can find this recipe in [book title]” and then link that book title to the recipe listing on nigella.com (in case one day it does become available on there). From that page, even if there is no recipe in full, you will be able to find a link to buy the book, should you want to. I will also try to remember to put the page number of the book in, too. I will not re-publish recipes on here and I will not link to other sources where someone else has clearly done just that without permission.
