Winter salad with grapes, green leaf lettuce and apples

Winter salad a la kitchen wench.

This is a delicious salad. It will make you feel healthy and full and may give you the illusion that you just ate at Postino's. They make a salad similar to this called the Barbara salad but it has field greens, orange beets, pears, grapes and comes with a side of yummy walnut bread. You can get it with chicken on top, which I like a lot. I also order it with their herb vinaigrette dressing instead of the raspberry vinaigrette (it is too sweet for me). If any of you have figured out how to make an herb vinaigrette, please share your recipe with me.

My version of the Barbara salad has green leaf lettuce, handful of grapes (halved), a small gala apple (cubed), a half handful of dried cranberries and the same amount of candied pecans (these last two courtesy of Trader Joe's).

For this salad I make a mustard vinaigrette with olive oil, red wine vinegar, a pinch of kosher salt and a tiny squeeze of dijon mustard. After a sprinkling of dressing I add an obscene amount of crushed black pepper.

Make this salad for yourself and someone you love (or like). It would go well with baked chicken, a steak, lamb chops or even a pizza.

I have to give my brother Mike partial credit for helping me come up with the idea to make this at home. He eats a lot (A LOT) of greens, mostly kale and spinach and chides me that I do not eat kale raw. I tell him for me it needs moved around in a skillet with olive oil and some shavings of garlic.

I digress. Mike makes a big salad, almost every night, and it will have kale or spinach, grapes, apples and oranges. He does not put a dressing on it. I tease him that he is going to live to be 100 if he keeps eating this way.

Rabbit food rocks!