Apple, Gorgonzola Salad

This is one of my favorite salads. The slightly sour taste of the cheese and cranberries blends wonderfully with the sweet and sour taste of the vinaigrette and apples. It's got a lot of interesting flavors. It is quick to make and extremely delicious. I make it often when entertaining and it's an easy to scale up recipe.

Ingredients
For the salad
1/4 cup blue cheese/gorgonzola, crumbled into small pieces
4 cups mixed greens, chopped
1 cucumber, diced into small pieces
1 apple, diced
1/4 cup cranberries
1/4 cup walnut, chopped (optional)

For the vinaigrette
1 tbsp strawberry jam
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup orange juice
salt to taste
1/8 tsp black pepper
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Method
Whisk together all the ingredients for the vinaigrette till an emulsion is formed and the oil and other ingredients are mixed together.
Toss together the greens, apples, cucumber, cranberries and walnuts. Drizzle the vinaigrette on the mixture to taste. Then add the blue cheese and lightly toss together.

Tips
You can subsitute the mixed greens with green or red leaf lettuce. Mixed greens are a mixture of different greens and herbs. There are different leaves like lettuce, endive, radicchio and arugula. These greens have different flavors including spicy and bitter flavors. Using mixed greens enhances the overall taste of a salad.

Strawberry and Walnut Salad

This is a great recipe to whip up for a quick dinner. Its light and a perfect starter to a meal. Pair it with some soup and you have a ready to eat meal in less than 20-30 minutes. Its also a great way to get your daily servings of vegetables and fruits and tasty too!

Ingredients
2-3 celery stalks - thinly diced
4-5 strawberries - sliced
2 cup of assorted lettuce leaves - diced
1 cucumber - sliced
1/3 cup walnuts
1/2 orange - diced

For the dressing
juice of 1/2 orange
1 tbsp honey
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
salt to taste
pepper to taste
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Method
Whisk together all the ingredients for the dressing till the olive oil is well blended into the rest of the ingredients.
In a bowl, toss all the salad ingredients together with the dressing. Add salt and pepper if required. You can grate some parmesan cheese over the salad, if you want.

Tips
Fresh orange juice enhances the salad dressing taste. However, if you do not have oranges, you can substitute with store bought orange juice. You can experiment and change the vegetables mixture in the salad.

Whole Wheat Fruit and Nut Biscotti

This is one of our favorite cookies!! Since we enjoy this so much and so often, I thought that if there was a way to make this healthier, I should. So, I decided to subsitute the regular ingredients with healthier ones, and the end result was delicious.

Ingredients
Dry ingredients
2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup sliced blanched almonds
1/3 cup walnuts
1/3 cup pecans
1/4 cup cranberries
1 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt

Wet ingredients
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence/ pure vanilla extract
1/2 a stick of butter (about 2 tsp) melted (optional)

Method
Combine all the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl and mix together. In another bowl break the 3 eggs and whisk them. Add the vanilla essence and mix. Then add the melted butter. Now, slowly pour this egg mixture into the dry ingredients and mix. Once you have added half the egg mixture, add the dry fruit and nutes. The resultant dough is a bit sticky.

Shape the dough into 2 logs approximately 10 x 3 inches long. Bake these two logs at 350° F for about 40 minutes. The logs will be light brown in color. Take these out onto a cooling rack and let it cool down for 10 minutes. Once the logs have cooled down sufficiently to handle, cut these into biscottis to the desired size. Generally about 1 X 3 inches in size. Place these back onto your baking sheet and bake them for about 10-20 minutes in the oven at 350° F.
Let the biscottis cool and enjoy! These biscottis are not as hard as the ones made with all purpose flour and remind me a lot of cake rusk.

Tips
Don't overmix the dough. Mix it just enough so that all the ingredients come together. Coat your hands with a little flour to work with the sticky dough to avoid getting your hands messy. The longer you bake the biscotti during the second baking, the harder it will get. Cut the logs into biscottis using a serrated knife to minimize crumbling and resultant crumbs.