Wild BC Licorice fern, sauteed leek & goat cheese salad

This salad is both comfortingly warm and fresh, reminiscent of Spring.


Ingredients:
8 leaves Licorice fern (optional if you know where to pick it)
250g Hard goat cheese (like BC Farmhouse Cheeseshop- Caephilly)
4 Radishes, thinly sliced, round
1 tsp Olive oil
1/2 Lime, juiced
2 Leeks - sliced fine
3 Tbs butter (salted)
4 tsp roasted BC hazelnuts
sea salt to taste

Directions:
Cube goat cheese into 1 cm. Tear licorice fern leaves off the stalk.
Saute leeks in butter till just soft and bright green. Mix all ingredients together, serve in the garden if you have one.

Licorice fern grows near streams in the Fraser Valley, BC. Shady places where there may be stinging nettles, so watch out and wear pants. It's not actually a fern, but it sure looks like one.
It's a slightly furry, fern leafed plant that tastes like sweet licorice when you eat the leaves. You can see the leaf in the picture of the salad above.

Warm, Smokey, Blue Cheese Salad

Eating a blue cheese salad with a knife and fork is exciting; you feel both barbaric and refined all at once. This is one of my new favourites as I've fallen in love with my new wood BBQ.

Ingredients:
For Dressing:
1/4 c Olive oil
1 lemon, squeezed
salt and cracked pepper to taste
1 Tbs grainy mustard
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tsp anchovy paste

For the Croutons:
1/2 of a baguette, chopped into 1cm cubes
2 cloves of garlic
4 Tbs Olive oil

A head of Romaine lettuce, cut in 1/4 length-wise and washed, then spun dry
4 slices of double smoked bacon, fried crispy
1/2 cup size chunk of a good blue cheese like Tiger Blue(Poplar Grove Cheeses, BC)

Serves 4 as appetizer portion
Recipe:
Make dressing; combine all ingredients into a small jar and shake vigorously.
Make croutons: grate garlic, put in bowl with olive oil, toss in bread cubes, spread on a baking tray and bake till crispy 5-10 min (400F oven).

Oil & then heat up your Grill or BBQ(BBQ will always taste better) to high(450 F approx). Put the romaine on the grill cut side down, grill 1 min then turn to grill the other cut side.

Remove from BBQ, plate, drizzle dressing over the lettuce, crumble the bacon and blue cheese over it, add cracked pepper and croutons and serve warm right away.

Wine pairing would be a lovely Chardonnay; something full and fruity to stand up to the big flavour of the blue cheese. I had an amazing Noble Ridge Chardonnay, BC, 2007, it went perfectly.

Simply Sally - Fennel Salad

Ok, I admit it, I went to a meat draw at a Legion recently. My friends and I won a ton of meat, huge thick cut steaks and pork. It was fabulous, we barbecued it up and felt like barons for a night. Strangely enough, one of the things that we ate that was most memorable was a salad, a very simple salad. Thinly sliced fennel in a bit of walnut oil, crushed walnuts, sliced cucumber, lemon, salt and shavings of a good Parmesan. We started the meal with it and we were drinking a German riesling which paired amazingly. On a tangent; if you were blindfolded at any liquor store, got someone to push you towards the German riesling, you would have an 80% chance of stumbling into a really great wine and an equal chance of breaking some bottles. Riesling`s the kind of stuff that would make fried eyeballs taste good. Two of my favourite producers are Selbach and Dr.Loosen, both make dry wines from the Mosel region, showing great acidity, fruit and that lovely stoney minerality. But back to the salad, fennel is definitely an unsung hero of the produce department. And I have no idea why, with its soft licorice flavours and a great crunch. It`s very subtle, though, so don`t mix it with anything too powerful; like the brainy kid in class that`s actually really cool, she`ll never speak up if you sit a bully next to her.