Saladosity, Part 15: Autumnal

[This is the fifteenth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

(If you need a refresher about my salad-making lingo, go back and review our first salad.)

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why this salad is called an “autumn salad” ... I don’t personally find it particularly autumnal, but I searched online for salads with similar ingredients, and what little concensus there was in the naming of it pointed to the seasonal moniker, so here we are.  Perhaps its because the fruit and nuts we’re going to add are commonly harvested in the autumn ... although, these days, you should have no problems finding any of this stuff year ‘round.  Still, “autumn salad” is what I’ve always called it, once I started calling it anything at all, and that’s what we’re sticking with here.

The Fruit

So this is one of those salads with some fruit in it.¹  Hopefully that doesn’t turn you off.  Trust me that this will all work out.

What this salad really should have in it is pears.  However, I dislike using pears for two reasons:

• I have a hell of a time keeping pears from going bad.  I like this salad quite a bit, but it’s very much a “once in a while” salad.  It’s a bit more of a pain to make, and it does contain some added sugar, so I just don’t eat it as often as the others.  That means that I often don’t get around to the pears before they go bad.
• Pears are, at least for me, a huge pain to prepare.  They’re annoying to peel, due to the irregular shape, and it’s annoying to try to get the core out.

Now, if you have some secret way to get pears into chunks, and you eat pears often enough that they won’t get bad, I definitely encourage you to substitute pears.  They’ll actually make this salad even better.

If, on the other hand, you’re a mere mortal like me, just use apples.  They keep for-friggin-ever, they’re super easy to peel,² and, because you bought all the stuff I told you to, you have a corer-slicer which will give you beautiful slices in a matter of seconds.  Once you have the slices, take half of them, cut each one into about four chunks each, and use that for your salad.  Eat the rest: they’re yummy.  Adjust amount and size of apple chunks to your taste.

The other fruit we need for this is dried cranberries.  This is the first place we’re going to have to be okay with added sugar, because I’ve never even seen any dried cranberries that were unsweetened ... and, honestly, even if you could find some, you probaly wouldn’t want to eat them.  Even sweetened, they’re not particularly sweet.  The added sugar just makes them tolerable.

The Nuts

You want walnuts for this.  Now, as I mentioned previously, I personally can’t find roasted walnuts—if I could, I sure would buy them.  If you’re ambitious enough to want to roast the walnuts yourself, again I encourage you to do that.  But we’re trying to keep it as simple and pain-free as we can, so I just use raw walnuts.  They’re perfectly lovely.  You bought the pieces, right?  That saves you having to chop them, and they’re usually cheaper to boot.

You could try other nuts, if, say, you really hate walnuts.  But honestly I think that makes it a whole different salad.  Try it at least once with the walnuts.  (Okay, you’ll most likely have to make it with walnuts several times, to use up the whole bag, but that’s not so bad.)  I think you’ll dig it.

The Dressing

For this one, you’re going to want a slightly sweet dressing.  If you really don’t want to make it yourself, you could try a raspberry vinaigrette, or a balsamic fig.³  But it works best with a good honey mustard.

Now, the primary problem with honey mustard dressing is that you can’t actually buy a good honey mustard dressing.  Oh, sure: you can find some decent honey mustard dip ... I like Ken’s, personally.  But if you have a burning desire to slather a chicken nugget in something, there are several good store-bought honey mustard choices.  For salads, on the other hand, most premade “dressings” are totally infeasible.  They’re too thick and goopy—that’s a great quality for a dip, but not really what you want in a salad dressing.  The answer, happily, is simple: make your own.

And it’s also super easy.  You won’t even need the food processor for this one.  Just a bowl and a spoon and a very small amount of elbow grease.  Although we do have to do a little bit of prep work first.  But don’t worry: this is prep stuff you just do occasionally and then you’re set for a while, not stuff you have to do every time you want to make the dressing.

Lemon Juice

Remember when I told you I was going to tell you how to juice your own lemons and it would really easy?  Okay, now’s the time.

Take your lemons and put them on the cutting board.  Slice them all in half around what would be their equators if they were little yellow Earths.  Now take your handy-dandy juicer that I told you to buy and plug it in.  Use the smaller reamer.  Now, one at a time, just put the lemon halves in your palm, put them onto the reamer, and push down.  That’s literally all there is to it.  But I’ll give you a few extra tips:

• You can adjust the basket to allow as much or as little pulp as you like, but for this application you’ll probably want as little pulp as possible.
• Once the pulp starts getting torn out, squeeze the lemon gently to bring more of the pulp into contact with the reamer.
• A good juicer will spin both ways.  Once you feel like you’ve gotten all you’re going to get, lift your hand up, the juicer will stop, and then push down again.  If you’re lucky, it will immediately begin spinning in the other direction.  (If you’re not, you’ll have to lift up and push back down a couple of times.)  It will only take a few seconds for this second reaming, but you may be surprised how much more you get after you thought you were all done.
• I mentioned before that lemon juice will keep forever, but it does eventually get so damned sour that you can’t stand it.  Also, it will develop white solids that you should strain out, because they’re sort of fibrous.  But if all that sounds icky to you, just freeze your lemon juice.  They way I love to do it (when I do do it) is in an ice tray.  Ice cube sizes vary according to tray, of course, but in my experience most ice cubes are almost exactly a tablespoon (a.k.a. 3 teaspoons).  I like the ice trays that have little covers on them, because that way the juice won’t pick up stray flavors, but that’s mostly my anal retentiveness showing.

Homemade Mayo

Now that you have lemon juice, making your own mayonnaise is trivial.  Take a mason jar and crack an egg into it.⁴  Add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice (that’s 2 cubes, if you froze it up above).  Squirt in just a small squirt of mustard: I like brown mustard for this, but any will do.  It’s mainly there for its emulsifying properties.  Toss in a heavy pinch of salt.  Top off with oil up to the 1½ cups line, or maybe a smidge above it.  Many places advise that you let this come to room temperature before proceeding, but I don’t find that it makes much difference (unless you need to wait for the lemon juice cubes to melt, of course).

Now just jam your handy-dandy stick blender (a.k.a. immersion blender) into the jar and turn it on.  Mayonnaise will magically appear.  It’s insane, I tell you.

Tips:

• You can experiment with different types of oil.  Sunflower is probably the best; canola is terrible for you, and olive and grapeseed just taste bad.  Avocado oil is nice, although you will end up with mayo that has a slightly greenish tinge if you use only avocado.  Personally, I like about half-and-half sunflower and avocado.  Occasionally I’ll go a little heavier on the avocado—perhaps to as much as 2/3—but then again I don’t mind greenish mayo.
• Until you’ve done this a couple of times, starting with a smaller amount of oil is better.  You can always add more as you’re blending.  Remember: more oil makes it thicker, which can be a bit counterintuitive if you’re thinking of the oil as a liquid.  But the emulsification of the oil is what makes the mayo, so more is thicker in this case.  Basically, start your blending and, if it’s too thin, add more oil.  If it’s too thick ... well, you’re sort of hosed.  Try again.
• You may need to gently move the stick blender up and down a bit to get the oil on top.  If you’re really good, you can cock the blender at a slight angle and create a vortex that sucks the oil down to the blades, but don’t feel bad if you can’t manage that.  Just plunge up and down a few times (gently) and you’ll achieve the same effect.
• This mayo is absolutely not just for this dressing.  Use it all the time.  Never buy mayo again.  Seriously: once you figure out how easy it is to make your own mayo, there ain’t no going back.

Put it all together

Ready to make some dressing?  Here’s what you’ll need:

• 4 big spoons of homemade mayo
• 1 tablespoon of lemon juice
• 5 big squirts of yellow mustard
• 1 little squirt of dijon mustard
• 4 big squirts of honey
• 2 heavy pinches of garlic powder
• 1 heavy pinch of salt

Just throw it all into a big bowl and stir it up.  The end.  Use a funnel to put it into an old salad dressing bottle and stick it in the fridge; it should last a couple of weeks, but don’t wait too long.

Feel free to mix up the ratio of yellow mustard to dijon, or add or subtract honey to your taste.  You should find this version way more tangy than sweet, but still sweet enough that you know it’s honey mustard.  I’ve also experimented with using vinegar instead of (or in addition to) the lemon juice, which makes it super-extra-tangy, but eventually I decided the lemon juice was the better call.

Don’t leave out the garlic powder though.  I was frustrated for months trying to create the perfect honey mustard before I found some recipe that suggested garlic powder.  Like you probably do, I thought this was an utterly insane idea.  Until I tried it.  Trust me on this one.

Autumn Salad

And now you’re ready.  At this point, you’ve already done the hard bits, so this is just assembly.

• base veggies
• walnuts
• dried cranberries
• feta cheese crumbles
• apple slices
• honey mustard dressing (normal)

There’s sweetness in the apples, the sweetener on the dried cranberries, and the honey in the honey mustard.  There’s also tartness in the cranberries, the feta cheese, and the lemon juice and dijon in the honey mustard.  Plus the crunch of the walnuts and the veggies ... this is one of my favorite “dinner” salads.  As I say, it’s not an everyday thing, but once every few weeks or so it’s a real treat.

Next time, we’ll experiment with some “south of the border” flavors.

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1 But not a fruit salad.  Totally different head.

2 Although, again, if you enjoy eating apple peels, you don’t even need to bother.  But ... blech.

3 Try Annie’s for some quality pre-bottled dressings: they have both of the kinds I mentioned.

4 You don’t have to use a mason jar, of course, but it’s easiest, because it has lines on it for 1 cup, etc.