Spinach Salad with Warm Bacon and Apple Cider Dressing

So yesterday (Wednesday) I made individual pot pies and a spinach salad for my weekly get-together. While the chicken pot pies were good, it was the salad that everyone raved about. It’s a rare thing to hear an entire table say “Wow! This is amazing.” about a salad.

Most times I think of summer when I eat a salad, but the dressing on this one made me think of fall. It must be the apple cider…

It was surprisingly simple to make and very very tasty.

Fruity Chicken Salad

I don’t make chicken salad often – actually, I can’t say that. I’ve never made chicken salad before. Recently my darling husband mentioned that I should try to since he found out that he very much likes it. In the last two days I have made two different types of Chicken salad. The first one, which I will detail in this post, was a fruity type salad complete with almonds and grapes. It was surprisingly easy to make and very yummy. While my husband put the chicken salad on toasted Hoagie rolls, I made lettuce wraps with some butter lettuce leaves.    It feeds upwards of 6 people in my opinion so if you want to make less just cut the ingredients in half.

Fruity Chicken Salad

Caramelized Pancetta and Fennel Salad

For my Mother’s birthday this year I decided to cook a meal for her. This was one of the first recipes I thought of when I started forming a menu. The first time I heard of it was while watching Giada De Laurentiis on the Food Channel. I tend to collect recipes from food shows and this one looked and sounded so good that I stored it in my recipe note book to make as soon as I could. So naturally when I came across it again I decided that my mother’s birthday would be a wonderful time to make it.

Fennel

Fennel: Florence fennel, also called finocchio, is cultivated throughout the Mediterranean and in the United States. It has a broad, bulbous base that’s treated like a vegetable. Both the base and stems can be eaten raw in salads or cooked in a variety of methods such as braising, sautéing or in soups. The fragrant, graceful greenery can be used as a garnish or snipped like dill and used for a last-minute flavor enhancer. –Copyright (c) 1995 by Barron’s Educational Series, from The New Food Lover’s Companion, Second Edition, by Sharon Tyler Herbst

Never having actually cooked with Fennel (discounting Fennel Seeds of course), I had a hard time finding it in the grocery store I shop at on a regular basis. This called for a trip to Whole Foods. If we could not find it there then I would have to make a trip to Central Market. Thankfully, it did not come to that.

One of the first things I noticed while working with Fennel was the strong licorice scent. As Licorice is one of the few flavors that I am not overly fond of I was afraid that it might be overpowering in the salad. I needn’t have worried. I believe the roasting process and the brown sugar served to cut the strong licorice flavor. At the end of dinner we actually picked through the salad to eat the remaining fennel.

There were very few things I would do differently when it comes to the preparation of this salad. I recommend roasting the fennel on its own for the first 10 minutes then adding the pancetta towards the end. This would be to ensure a nice caramelized coloring of the pancetta instead of a something that looks burned (though it tasted just as good as the rest) especially if the slices of pancetta you are working with are fairly thin.

Timing is everything for this salad. You want to be able to serve the salad while the pancetta and fennel are still warm (though it tastes wonderful cooled as well) which makes things tricky when you have other dishes to finish and want to serve it well before the main course.