Autumn Salad with Maple Cider Vinaigrette and Sugar Curried Walnuts

This salad is wonderful and can be adapted slightly based on greens available. It has been a couple years since I've made this salad but it was just as good as I remembered. While the recipe calls for spinach, I used a premixed bag of baby lettuces which worked out great. The recipe also calls for blue cheese, but I'm weird about the texture, flavor and "blueness" of blue cheese and opted to use goat cheese instead. I have had this salad with blue cheese before and it was delicious, so it's your preference. Seeing as how I forgot to buy a red onion, I substituted some green onion which worked out nicely too. The final adaption I made tonight was using white wine vinegar in place of cider vinegar because, well, it seems I was out.

Hmmm... seems I actually made an entirely different salad tonight!

So, here is the recipe as it was written but feel free to adapt! Enjoy!

Salad
10 oz or more baby spinach (use more)
1 ripe pear, cored and thinly sliced
1/2 small red onion, thinly sliced OR 3 green onions chopped
4 oz crumbled blue cheese

Sugar Curried Walnuts
1 cup walnuts
2 TBS butter, melted
3 TBS sugar
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/8 tsp curry powder
1/8 tsp salt and pepper

Toss walnuts in melted butter. Stir together sugar and remaining dry ingredients. Sprinkle over walnuts and toss to coat. Spread onto nonstick aluminum foil-lined pan. Back at 350 for 10 minutes.

Maple Cider Vinaigrette
1/3 cup cider vinegar
2 TBS maple syrup
1 TBS Dijon mustard
1/8 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
2/3 cup olive oil (or a little less)

Once the walnuts cool a little bit, sprinkle them over the salad.

Chicken with Pear-Sage Chutney

Yummy! I love this dish! Not only is it beautiful with red pears and red bell peppers, it tastes so good. The flavors offered in this recipe are so wonderful - sweet, but not too sweet all offset by the savory touch of sage.

This dish cooks up quickly and the prep time is pretty minimal. I use Quorn naked patties for this recipe.

I served this dinner with a side of wild rice cooked in veggie broth and frozen peas. I don't use Uncle Ben's or any other rice with pre-seasoned packets - too much salt and the packet over does the spices. I like plain wild rice cooked with broth and olive oil.

6 quorn naked patties

olive oil

salt/pepper

1/2 red onion chopped

1 red bell pepper, chopped

2 TBS brown sugar

3 TBS cider vinegar

1/2 tsp dried sage

1/2 tsp whole mustard seeds

2 cored, chopped red pears

1. Saute quorn patties in olive oil/salt/pepper over med-high until browned on both sides. Remove.

2. Reduce heat to medium and add onion and bell pepper. Cook about 3 minutes.

3. Add sugar, vinegar, sage, mustard seed and salt/pepper. Simmer 5 minutes. Add pears and cook 10 minutes.

4. Add chicken and serve.

***I place the sage and mustard seeds in with the vinegar, that way it's all ready when time to add to the pan. I just dump in all three together, nice and easy. You may want to have the brown sugar pre-measured too, just to make it easier, but don't add it to the vinegar cup because it is difficult to get it all out. You will be scraping the measuring cup, cursing at the left over sugar granules.***

Start the wild rice long before preparing the chicken dish as the rice will cook almost an hour. I started preparing the main dish about 30 minutes into the rice's cooking time.