Insalata avenale: Carrot salad with a twist

and here i am with another recipe! i go nuts for salads and the more stuff is in them, the better. i’d already written a while ago about the winter salad made with fennel and oranges, and i’ll soon be writing about summer salads, but now here’s a salad that works all year round.

5 years ago, while i was on vacation with my husband at a friend’s house in avenale, a tiny village that’s on the outskirts of the town of cingoli in the italian region of le marche, we were out of nearly everything in the kitchen and we invented this salad with what there was left. and aren’t we glad about that! since then, it’s become one of our staples. we named this salad “insalata avenale” (avenale salad).

all you need to do is grate carrots and cooked beets (those precooked ones in those little plastic sacks are just fine) and dress it with extra virgin olive oil, apple vinegar and salt. this is the base recipe and you can add tons of other things. in the salad in the picture here i also added sesame seeds, nutritional yeast in flakes (i am incapable of making a salad and not putting this stuff in it. it’s just awesome.) and a little bit of freshly grated ginger. but other times i put in sunflower seeds (or other seeds), dulse seaweed flakes (good source of iron), chunks of apple, gomasio (crushed sesame seeds) or whatever else.

this salad is great not only for its taste but also because everyone always has a carrot or two in the fridge and those little baggies of cooked beets last a while, so it’s an easy side dish that you can make on those days you just can’t manage to get out to do the shopping.

then, i wanted to tell you all about something i discovered with the recipe for dried tomato pesto. as time goes by, i put a higher and higher percentage of dried tomatoes in this recipe, making the pesto redder and with a stronger flavor. (if you look at this picture, which is from the original post last year, you’ll see that it’s pretty green.) recently i discovered that this stronger pesto is really good if you add some cream cheese to the hot pasta when mixing it with the pesto. it makes the flavor much sweeter and creamier. mmmm…yummy!

p.s. today is my birthday! i’m hoping that the weather holds out and we’ll be able to go to the amalfi coast to finally go swimming for the first time this year!