12 Days of Prunemas: BIG Winter Green Hazelnut Salad with Honey Prune Sauce
Happy NEW YEAR's DAY and Day 8 of Prune Christmas - We're eating healthy and other "New Year's Resolutions" to forget about by......tomorrow!!
This is a post for all subscribers sponsored by CAPrunes. It is the eighth of 12 posts over 12 days, celebrating ways to enjoy delicious prunes.
HAPPY 2025! Happy eight day of Christmastide! Happy final night of Hanukkah! Shall we start it with things that are good for us, body and soul? Like a BIG SALAD and more music? This is the energy we want to bring this year. Traditionally it was a day for opening your house and welcoming in neighbors.
If you have any nostalgia for the 90s lived or envied, you know the NEED for a BIG SALAD as captured by Elaine Benes on Seinfeld. A Big Salad is important. But salad is even more important on New Year’s Day because it is made up of lots of lucky foods to eat - greens are believed to bring you money, hazelnuts are considered luxurious and bestowing of divine luck especially fertility, pomegranate brings abundance and our favorite IT GIRL PRUNES symbolizing coins and wealth. Pomegranate is also special to Judaism because it is believe to have 613 seeds (not true!) the same number as laws in the Torah (very romantic!).
Need more reasons to join me in Greece THIS YEAR? The Greeks loved pomegranate as well for the New Year and smashing things! In order to ensure luck in the New Year a pomegranate would be smashed hard onto the doorstep of a home, the more seeds that scattered and the farther it reached - the more luck would bestowed on the house. The Greeks really know how to have fun with food!
Today’s salad is big enough to feed two, loaded with toasted hazelnuts, lots of herbs bitter greens and a saucy vinaigrette with our bff prunes and honey. It’s crazy how much it looks (and tastes) like a honey mustard dressing which is the basis of a classic French Vinaigrette, you chic B#%*@. You’ll actually be making a versatile thicker paste, that can be used for marinading meat, tossing roasted vegetables or thinning out for salads. I like creating a base like this because it stays fresher longer and has more uses! I’ll be eating this salad with a platter piled high with latkes close tonight to close out the Festival of Lights. It’s about balance.
BIG Winter Green Salad
One Big Salad and 1 Pint of Sauce
Salad:
Two big handfuls of baby spinach
1 medium radicchio, chopped
1 bunch dill, picked
1 bunch parsley, picked
3/4 cup hazelnuts, toasted
Pomegranate, arils pulled out
Sauce:
1 shallot, minced
3 clove garlic, minced
Juice 1 lemon
2 Tbs Hot Honey
1/2 cup Prunes
1/2 cup olive oil
White Pepper
Salt
Method:
Make sauce by combining alliums with lemon juice, honey and prunes. Let sit for 5 minutes to marinate. Add prunes and olive oil, use an immersion blender to whip together. Season with white pepper and salt.
Build salad by washing greens well. Cut radicchio into three or four pieces crosswise. Pick herbs! Cutting herbs is nice for finishing off some protein dishes but in a salad they eat and look better picked. They also stay fresher. Pick your herbs for salads, make it a New year’s Resolution - you deserve it.
Thin out sauce to make a lighter vinaigrette, by adding olive oil and a squeeze of lemon. Toss salad greens and herbs in dressing. Pile on a plate like a bouquet of flowers, top with toasted hazelnuts and pomegranate arils.
Note: Feel free to add a protein or a nice hard cheese here like Manchego! Sometimes it’s nice to just be green.
Happy eight day of Christmastide! Happy Last Night of Hanukkah! Celebrate big by making my 1 Kilo Gelt.
xoxo
P.s. Resolutions still fresh on the brain, well what about dear ole brain:
First Up on my reading this this year, BIG MAGIC by Elizabeth Gilbert and Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield.
Get my book Bread and Roses 2023. People can’t stop making the Miso Barley Chocolate Chip Cookies, the Apple Onion Rye Focaccia, the Chocolate Custard Pie in an all butter Sonora Crust, the Buckwheat, Yuzu, Coconut Chiffon Showstopper Cake and so much more. It was named a Best Cookbook of 2023 by the Los Angeles Times and Bon Appetite Magazine.
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