When it comes to making lunch for work, I always try to make sure I eat a salad at least twice a week (and usually soup twice as well), but it can be quite challenging to come up with interesting salads in Autumn – Winter times. So I looked in my flavour bible and found that dates are in season at the moment, so I decided to make my first ever date salad!
I ended up going for a blue cheese dressing as I had tasted dates with Cashel Blue before and remembered it being so tasty, but at the same time I didn’t want to just slice up some cheese and be done with it. So I mixed in some Avonmore sour cream, a little bit of mayo and boom: a tasty fully Irish dressing was born!
Some pecans and prosciutto to give it a bit of crunch and extra flavour to finish it off and I was good to go! It took me less than 15 minutes to make so it’s ideal if you’re in a bit of a rush.
Recipe
Ingredients
- 75g Cashel blue, or another blue cheese
- 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise
- 125ml sour cream
- 200g Medjool dates
- handful of pecans
- 100g rocket leaves
- 70g prosciutto
Instructions
Preheat your oven to 200°C and place the pecan nuts on a roasting tray.
Bake in the oven for 5 minutes and set aside.
Blend the blue cheese with mayo and sour cream into a nice thick but runny dressing, add more mayo and cream if you want it to be a bit lighter. At first mine was quite thick, more like cottage cheese, so I added a bit more mayo and cream to get it more towards a mayo consistency.
Carefully make a cut along your dates, remove the pit and add the dates to a bowl with rocket leaves. Add your roasted pecans, slice up the prosciutto and add it as well.
Grind a bit of black pepper on top and drizzle the blue cheese dressing on top. Enjoy!
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