Recipe Review: Superfoods Salad with Chicken

Today's recipe to review happened by circumstance. Yesterday, at my meeting with the Custom Built Chiks, the group leader offered Valentine's Day superfoods for us to sample. She had brought in several rosy-hued vegetables and fruits, and we learned about their health benefits. Most all rosy colored foods have one thing in common: a high vitamin C content. You can see what superfoods we sampled by going to this blog post. At the end of the meeting, there were several items we hadn't sampled, including radicchio, radishes and apples. So, since she offered, I took a couple of these items home. And since today is my recipe review day, I searched for a recipe that would allow me to use all these ingredients. I found the perfect one.

This salad recipe allowed me to utilize the radicchio, radishes and apple I had procured from the meeting. And since I had a package of Oscar Mayer grilled chicken strips, I had to do almost no cooking. The only heating I did was a toasting of some walnuts to top the salad and warming the chicken strips in the microwave. Of course, it wouldn't be a recipe review if I didn't substitute a few things. I had gotten a red delicious apple, so I used that instead of a granny smith. Also, I couldn't find walnut oil, so I just used extra virgin olive oil. I didn't have any dijon mustard, so I used spicy brown. Finally, the original recipe didn't have chicken as one of the ingredients, but I felt the meat would help make this a dinner salad instead of a side salad.

This salad was very different than the normal salads I eat. There was certainly a lot of crunch in this salad from the fresh veggies and fruit, and also from the walnut topping. But the flavor was quite pungent. Radicchio has a strong bitter flavor, and radishes tend to be spicy. Even with the sweetness from the orange vinaigrette, nothing could cut through the strong flavors in this salad. The salad was pretty good, but it had more radicchio than I like. Perhaps if the base was regular romaine lettuce with a little radicchio sprinkled throughout, it wouldn't have been quite so "in your face". I probably won't repeat this recipe, but if you really like the pungent flavors of radicchio and radishes, this one is definitely for you.