Seasonal Winter Salads

My Love of Sugarloaf Chicory and a Simple Recipe for a Winter Citrus Salad

I am addicted to citrus salads ever since a dear friend brought this really awesome one to a gathering last month. I can’t get enough. Luckily, it’s citrus season.

Salads in the winter can sometimes be tricky when we are wanting to eat more seasonally. Thanks to the productive endeavours of my mother’s green thumb, we once again have a cold cellar stocked with Sugarloaf Chicory. Sugarloaf is a mild salad green, slightly bitter in flavour that stores well into January (or even February if we are lucky) wrapped in newspaper in our cold cellar. Thanks goes out to Pia who got us on to this storage trick and this particular variety of endive, the seed for which we order here.

My love of food, gardening and seasonal eating comes to me from my mother.

My mother likes to eat fresh greens. Every day. Which, as you can imagine gets a bit tricky in the winter if you want to eat seasonally - and from your own garden.

About 25 years ago I was introduced to the work of Eliot Coleman and his book Four Season Harvest. It radically changed the way that I view food. It got me to explore the use of cold frames, frost cloth and unheated high tunnel greenhouses in extending the harvest through all four seasons in our Zone 5 growing range. There are salad greens hardy enough to withstand winter conditions in this climate zone with some protection from the elements.

I learned a lot through this process and found that the patience and effort required to grow baby greens all winter long was more than I could muster. So my hat goes off to all those AMAZING market gardeners who do the work to bring this kind of high quality food to our tables year round. And I gladly pay generously for the kind of diligence and commitment to the task required to grow baby greens in the winter in our climate.

Home grown greens

Over the years I found that spinach was one of the hardiest and easy to grow winter greens, but after ending up with gout 🤣 from eating too many high oxalate greens one winter (trust me, that will be another post), I gave up on the spinach. Kale is now my top choice for winter growing in the unheated high tunnel greenhouse, but there are still some tricks I am working out on this one.

This is why I LOVE Sugarloaf Chicory. The seeds are planted in the summer. As they grow, the heads have an appearance somewhat similar to romaine lettuce. They tolerate light frost well and continue to grow late into the Fall, with the goal of harvesting before the first really hard frost. At that point they are wrapped in newspaper and stored in the cold cellar. The heads have to be a good size in order to store well. Once you unwrap them, remove the outer browned leaves and voila - a beautiful head of salad greens to enjoy throughout the winter months.

They don’t last the whole winter, which makes us appreciate the first new growth of greens in the spring - ushered in by the tiny rosettes of dandelion leaves that are are among the first to emerge wild among the grasses in mid April. These dandelion greens tide us over for a few weeks until the overwintered lettuces protected by frost cloth in the cold frames and high tunnel start to push through.

April through September, my mother diligently succession plants an ongoing array of salad greens every few weeks to ensure a continual garden harvest of various greens and endives that usually takes us well into December, if not Christmas, weather permitting. And then the cycle with our dear Sugarloaf chicory starts again.

Here is my mother in her carefully tended garden.

The mild bitter flavour of this chicory pairs particularly well with the sweet and tangy flavours of crisp sliced apples, sweet pears, roasted beets, and the bright citrus tones of oranges and grapefruit.

Today’s salad is going to pair together with sardines for a superfoods lunch. I know, it’s hard to get one’s head around sardines if you are not used to eating them. There are a few particular accompaniments I have found that makes them a tasty addition to my lunch. If it’s not one of the salads listed above, it might be a winter cabbage salad with plenty of apple cider vinegar, or a generous dollop of chimichurri (a green herb sauce featuring lemon, parsley and onions) to bring out the best of the humble sardine.

I am always looking for ways to get more superfoods into my diet. Sardines rank high on this list and are one of my favourite fast food lunch options. They travel particularly well. The only trick is to avoid spilling the juice all over me when I crack open the can. Compared to other seafood, sardines are relatively low in toxins such as mercury. And being low on the food chain, are one of the best seafood options available to us. For more info on figuring out best seafood choices see EWG's Seafood Calculator

If sardines are not your jam, this salad would be a great dinner addition to broiled salmon. It’s also a great accompaniment to a heavier dinner meal. It was delicious this past week, paired with a dinner of roasted potatoes, brussels sprouts and gently braised grass fed beef. The grapefruit offset the heavier winter flavours beautifully.

A SIMPLE ENDIVE AND GRAPEFRUIT SALAD

4 cups of chopped Sugarloaf chicory or other endive, escarole, arugula or salad greens

One large Ruby red grapefruit, cut into segments

1/4 cup of sliced red onion

1/4 cup of roasted pumpkin seeds or shelled pistachios

1- 2 tablespoons of highest quality olive oil

1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar

2 teaspoons of maple syrup or honey

pinch of salt

Combine all of the ingredients in a bowl. Toss and adjust the seasonings to taste. Serve