Jenny's Week: Winter Salad – a contradiction in terms, surely? (From Bournemouth Echo)

Jenny's Week: Winter Salad – a contradiction in terms, surely?

10:20am Saturday 13th March 2010 in

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I admit it. I have been know to be somewhat contemptuous about the idea of a “Winter Salad”. You know the sort of thing I mean – it’s salad, but yet not salad, because it’s (in the large part) warm.

I expect we’ve all seen the “cheffy” salads that involve two spinach leaves, three rocket leaves and some lemon vinaigrette. These also incur my contempt.

However, back to warm winter salads.

You see, we’re at that stage in the year when we’re all a bit fed up with the jolly old pea, the “it’s terribly good for you” carrot and the “it’s lovely with a bit of butter and black pepper” Savoy cabbage. All those things may be true, but doesn’t your heart yearn for something light, with a choice of flavours in the same dish? Something that won’t leave you feeling like you need a JCB to move you from your chair?

Mine did.

All of which may go some way to explaining why I wound up contemplating the possibility of the said “Winter Salad”.

I spotted the recipe when I was trawling through those on the BBC’s Good Food website, which is a wonderful resource for inspiration, I find.

The salad part of it appealed to me. However, there didn’t appear to be any meat involved. A bit of pondering later and with the addition of a pack of sausages to satisfy the boys’ meat requirements and bingo! We’re done.

Well, let me tell you, I shall no longer be contemptuous of the Winter Salad. What a joyous treat for the taste buds, it turned out to be – and with the plus sides of being a) terribly easy to produce and b) almost low fat! (Ahem, well, I managed to lose 13 pounds in the last fortnight, so it can’t have been all THAT bad!).

So, it went like this. Firstly, I took a pack of sausages and roasted them on a rack until they were browned, then put them aside to keep warm.

While they were roasting, I had prepared some Butternut Squash, Parsnip and Carrot (cut into batons about the width of a finger, then put into a bowl and olive oil drizzled over), some red Onions (cut into wedges) some Red Pepper (cored and cut into 2 inch chunks) and Mushrooms which I’d simply cleaned. I placed the lot into a roasting tin, seasoned with salt and pepper, sprinkled over some Thyme and threw in a couple of Garlic cloves and put on to roast for 35-40 mins.

In the meantime, I prepared a simple vinaigrette of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt & pepper and opened a bag of baby spinach.

Once the roasted vegetables were done, I poured a little dressing over the spinach leaves and piled them up on the plate. Then, I chopped the sausages into four wedges each and arranged them on top of the spinach with the roasted vegetables. Another little drizzle of the vinaigrette – and serve.

Discovering the flavours of all the roasted vegetables was interesting enough, but the best bit was all the different flavour combinations you could get onto one forkful! The vinaigrette was the “thing that held it all together” (to quote Masterchef) and even my 11yr old son ate the lot.

I’m thinking that perhaps I should have ventured into winter salad land a lot earlier!