Serve green salad with pear dressing for Thanksgiving
Digging into the Thanksgiving Day feast is a joy, but preparing it takes work. This Green Salad with Pear Dressing is a simple but elegant first course, and it will take some of the stress out of the gig. And bonus! it's lighter than the usual holiday recipe. How did we do it? By swapping out some of the oil in favor of a very flavorful pear puree.
Indeed, this salad is an ode to pears, teamed up with a couple of their best buddies: walnuts and blue cheese. (Cheese!? So much for lightness, right? Not really. There's only half-an-ounce per person.) You'll need one very ripe pear for the dressing and two firm ripe pears to slice and add to the salad, so planning ahead is key. Most pears in the supermarket are rock hard when you buy them and need several days to ripen. You can speed up the process by placing them in a brown paper bag alongside a bunch of bananas.
Walnut oil is our oil of choice because it complements the pear's sweetness. (It also happens to be wonderful drizzled on vegetables, raw or cooked, and on all sorts of cheeses.) My favorite brand is La Tourangelle from France, but there are many other brands, both domestic and imported, that will do the job. Just be sure to store it in the refrigerator once you've opened it because walnut oil — like any other nut or seed oil — can go rancid easily if left at room temperature too long. Still, if you don't want to invest in a bottle — it's a little pricey — use safflower or sunflower oil instead.
Likewise, you're welcome to swap in a different nut for the walnuts and a different cheese for the blue cheese, including Parmigiano-Reggiano, goat cheese, or aged Gouda.
You can whip up the dressing, toast and chop the nuts, and crumble the cheese several days before the big feast. Then on Turkey Day there's nothing to do but toss the salad, slice the pears and serve. It's the kind of salad that looks very pretty on the plate.
• Sara Moulton is host of public television's “Sara's Weeknight Meals.” She was executive chef at Gourmet magazine for nearly 25 years and spent a decade hosting several Food Network shows, including “Cooking Live.” Her latest cookbook is “HomeCooking 101.”