A go-for-broke cold-weather salad to roast up all winter
In spring and summer, salads can be easily thrown together with a few - or many - fresh, seasonal raw ingredients. In fall and winter, they take a little more thought, because usually at least some of those elements need to be cooked.
But the same principles of salad making apply, especially the primary one: Think about texture. When you do - combining, say, some roasted vegetables with some raw ones, and making sure to include something creamy and something crunchy - magic can happen.
The latest cold-weather salad to seek entry into my repertoire comes from “Cooking, Blokes & Artichokes: A Modern Man's Kitchen Handbook” by Brendan Collins (Kyle, 2016). Collins, a Los Angeles chef who hails from England, brings a dude-food sensibility to his book, and he approaches salad making with the same go-for-broke approach as, say, a grilled skirt steak and horseradish sandwich.
This salad combines roasted root vegetables and shallots with raw endive (or, because I couldn't find those, radicchio) leaves, in a classic sherry vinaigrette. Straightforward enough. But the killer touch is burrata cheese, which you tear and scatter on the salad along with a raft of crushed hazelnuts. If burrata is not available nearby, fresh ricotta (a nondairy one if you're vegan) would be a fine substitute.
Either way, you'll end up with a salad you don't want to stop eating. If the idea of a crave-worthy salad is news to you, that's all the more reason to make this one.