Wanna sound all fancypants when a friend invites you to a potluck brunch? Tell them you’ll bring a salad of peach slices over spinach sprinkled with goat cheese and walnuts topped off with French sorrel salad dressing.
Olga recently invited Sylvie and me for a girls’ lunch where she served a delicious lamb dish. I was tasked with bringing salad, one of my favorite dishes with which to experiment. So what did I have on hand? Cheese, nuts, spinach and fresh peaches. And French sorrel. A friend gave me the sorrel from her CSA (community assisted agriculture) share, and I was pretty stumped about what to do with it. So I read up on it a bit and the idea of a dressing kept cropping up all over the internet.
Sorrel Salad Dressing
Serving size varies based on how much you wish to make
Sorrel
Lemon basil (or plain basil)
Garlic
Olive Oil
Lemon Juice
Salt
In a blender, finely chop/puree sorrel. Add one small garlic clove, a few sprigs of lemon basil, a generous pour of olive oil, a squirt of lemon juice and a couple pinches of salt. Blend, adding olive oil to get dressing to desired consistency. Taste as you add a little of this and a little of that until you achieve a pleasing combination of flavors.
This dressing is delicious atop a salad consisting of a bed of baby spinach, sliced fresh peaches, creamy goat cheese and crunchy walnuts.
Sorrel is versatile in that in can be used as an herb or a green. It also happens to be a very rich source of Vitamin C, and contains Vitamin A, so this dressing proves to be a lovely nutritional addition to a powerhouse salad.
What do you make with sorrel? What’s your favorite summer salad?