An odd combination, but it worked!

I love spontaneous salads – actually I love spontaneous food, when you have a selection of odds and ends and you don’t necessarily just chuck them all together but you makes something from them that blends the different flavours and textures. Thinking back to what I’ve written about over the last couple of days, Caesar salad and Cobb salad, that’s pretty much how they were first created and then became an actual thing!

I’m not suggesting what I put together today might become famous as a Lois salad, but it really was very tasty and a combination of things which I will repeat – maybe with a couple of tweaks. It was an odd combination because three of the four items were related to each other, vegetable cousins you might say, and the fourth item was absolutely not and actually wasn’t a vegetable at all but a fruit!

Lois salad

• ¼ cucumber, washed but skin on
• 1 small, or ½ a large courgette, skin on
• sliced pickled gherkins – in a light pickle (Freshona are best), and some of the liquor
• 1 apple, cored but skin on
• olive oil
• pomegranate molasses

1. cut the vegetables and fruit  into equal sized cubes – cut the slices of gherkin into small squares
2. mix the cubes and squares
3. make a dressing to your taste of oil and pickling liquor – and any spices in with the gherkins if you like
4. dress the salad and then leave for a while, not in the fridge but covered for the flavours to meld
5. drizzle over the pomegranate molasses

I didn’t add any salt, I thought the pickling liquor was enough, but you can add some i you like, ditto pepper. The only thing I might add next time is maybe some cubed feta, or cubed stale bread, or chopped fresh herbs.

An odd combination, but it worked!