Endive Apple Salad

Being healthy sometimes means eating gross stuff. While that’s true, I don’t think I’ll ever learn how to love kale but I know it’s good for me, eating healthy doesn’t have to always mean shoving stuff that is completely unappealing down your throat. It does mean having a more open mind towards things you wouldn’t have thought of eating before, finding ways to cook them that help their tastes appeal to you, and staying away from food that you know is not good for you.

I realize this can be a struggle especially if you’re not confident in your kitchen or generally don’t enjoy cooking. It’s also a struggle if you do enjoy to cook but the chaos of life makes the prospect of putting a healthy meal on the table darn near impossible on a regular basis.

When those obstacles are standing in your way, but your goal is to have something delicious and healthy, then it’s a matter of figuring out how to leverage not just your time but the food you find in the most efficient way possible. For me, this meant repeating recipes week after week that I knew my family enjoyed, then once I got comfortable with those recipes, changing them to keep them fresh. From there, I could expand the ingredients I knew how to cook with to other ingredients.

That’s how this salad came about. I love a good salad but wanted to switch it up from always having a green leaf in the salad. I started by putting in fennel, but learned quickly that if fennel is not sliced extremely thinly, the licorice flavor could be overwhelming. Soon this whole process snowballed out of control and before I knew it, this salad was born.

The great thing about this salad is that it makes for easy meal prep. As long as you leave the dressing off of it, you could make it the morning of or night before you plan to serve it, keep it in the refrigerator and it’ll hold.

Pro Tip: I usually leave the apple and the avocado off as well when I meal prep it because of the oxidation of those fruits.

My other Pro Tip: If you have a mandolin, use that to make sure you get a thin slice on the fennel. Or be extra cautious with your knife, because the thinner sliced the fennel, the better.

The balance of the flavors helps to make the fennel much more mild, but the crunch is amazing, and the acidity from the vinegar in the dressing balances out some of the sweetness as well.

endive apple salad

Prep time: 10 minutes

Serves: 4 people

Salad:

2 fennel bulbs, thinly sliced

3 Belgium endives, thinly sliced

1/2 shallot, diced

1 red apple, cored and diced

1 avocado, diced

2 tblsp. crumbled goat cheese

1/4 C sliced almonds

1/3 C micro greens

Salad Dressing:

1/4 C olive oil

2 tblsp. red wine vinegar

2 tblsp. honey dijon mustard

salt and pepper to taste

Mix all of the salad dressing ingredients in a small bowl, whisk until well combined and set aside.

Grab a medium bowl, place all of your salad ingredients in the bowl, pour the dressing on top, and toss until well combined. Serve immediately!