Persimmon Salad
Ingredients:
2 persimmons
one small can of mandarin oranges
fennel bulb
shallot
toasted walnuts
pomegranate seeds
baby salad greens
Dressing:
juice of one lemon
minced garlic clove
pinch dry mustard
2 T of the juice from the mandarins
olive oil
salt
The only tricky part of this salad has to do with the persimmons. I'm told that when they're perfectly ripe, you can just eat persimmons out of hand. However I've only ever had them from grocery stores. They're one of those fragile fruits like figs-- they get picked while hard, so they're either unripe, or mushy and bruised most times at the market. Eaten untreated, they have a delicious taste, followed by a horrible dry-mouth tannin effect. To eliminate this problem, you just slice them thinly and simmer them for five minutes or so in the juice from the mandarin oranges. This will eliminate the weird dry-mouth feel and bring out the sweetness. When they're perfect, it's like a peach and a pumpkin had a very tasty baby.
Once you've dealt with the persimmons, slice the fennel and shallot very thinly and toss everything together with the dressing. We had it with salmon and cous cous. The salad stole the show.
(I should credit Marche restaurant in Eugene for the salad. I don't know if this is an exact copy, but I had something very similar there and approximated it as closely as I could.)
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In case you don't know already, we have a persimmon tree in our front yard. We had a huge crop this year. Some years we do, some we don't. Assuming we have some next year, come have some. We could trade for something. (Like making us some salad maybe.) :) Gretchen
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