I love a good salad, always have. I wonder how huge of a mountain my lifetime of salads would make.

Or at least I did love salad. But then along came the romaine scare, and then finding out that canola oil messes up your omega 3/omega 6 balance (and canola is in every salad dressing). So I made my own dressing, and then got really, really tired of making it. Yeah, I know it only takes a minute to slap together a tasty viniagrette. There’s a river of tasty viniagrette flowing next to the mountain of salad in the landscape of my dining life.

So I needed to shake up the old salad routine. I still wanted the crispy, crunchy goodness, not to mention the vitamins and fiber, but it really needed to taste fantastic. So one day I saw Giada what’s-her-name on Everyday Italian make this salad, and I just happened to have everything on hand, so I whipped it up fast to go with some baked fish for dinner. Delicious.

I’m incredibly lazy – I don’t like to look up recipes, I prefer winging it from memory, an increasingly risky proposition, or making substitutions – if there isn’t any white wine vinegar in the house, then any white wine will work just fine. No parsley? No problem. Chives it is. The thing is, if you don’t mess up the basic ingredients – the curry, fresh carrots and pears – and you know your way around EVOO and its best friend vinegar (or wine, see above), then you’ll have something really tasty in about 10 minutes.

Curried Carrot & Pear Salad

Ingredients

6 or 8 carrots, peeled
2 firm pears (Bosc or D’anjou)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon curry powder (the fresher the better)
2 teaspoons honey
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Use a vegetable peeler to peel long, thin strips of carrot, mostly the orange outer carrot and not so much the yellow inner more bitter part. Peel the pears and slice into very thin strips. Mix them together with the chopped parsley in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk together the vinegar, curry powder, honey, salt and pepper until combined. Toss with the carrot and pear mixture and serve right away. A pinch of sea salt to finish doesn’t go amiss! And one time I tried a squeeze of lime, which was wonderful.

Loraine Fick is a writer and low-carb food experimenter with a love for animals and cake. Her greatest challenge is a short attention span, and her greatest strength, at least foodwise, is a desire to share recipes that are good and good for you. Follow Loraine’s blog at Spoonfully – Adventures in Low-Carb Cooking & Baking.