Making a New Year’s Salad of Fresh Apples and Dried Apricots

Dressed with an extra-aged apple cider vinegar from Quebec

Here’s a great little salad that you can make at home in a matter of minutes! The apples and honey combination makes it ideal if you’re celebrating the Jewish holidays. That said, you can just be celebrating apple season in Michigan. Either way, it’s wonderful!

To make the salad, pick up some heirloom apples at the farmers market (or other good source of local apples). Core and slice them horizontally into rounds, or alternatively make them into thin wedges. Drizzle on a bit of honey—the sunflower honey I wrote up last week would work well, as would most of our amazing varietal honeys.

Toast some walnuts—I love the tasty red walnuts we have at the Deli. I like to add them whole to really feature the texture and flavor, but chopping them smaller will do as well. If you have high-quality hazelnuts or good pecans (we have great ones at the Deli), those will work well in the salad too!

Chop some dried apricots and sprinkle those on as well—with apricots in my mind as the symbol of dignity and democracy, this is a wonderful way to add a bit of both to the New Year celebration. The Creamery shop has some great dried apricots from California. They add color, texture, and sweetness to the dish.

Sprinkle on some good vinegar. I’ve been hooked on a newly arrived, long barrel-aged, XO Balsamic-Style Apple Cider Vinegar from the folks at Gingras up in Quebec. They take fresh apple cider, reduce it down, then blend it with aged cider vinegar in a series of wood barrels. The result is a super-concentrated, sweet, and complex vinegar. Finish it with a drizzle of olive oil, freshly ground pepper, and a sprinkle of fleur de sel.

The salad beautifully recreates the colors of our local autumn leaves: red, yellow, and white from the apples; orange from the apricots; brown and red from the walnuts! As lovely to look at as it is to eat!

P.S. You won’t see the Gingras XO Cider Vinegar on the Mail Order websites, but we’d be glad to ship you some—just email us at [email protected].