Warm cavolo nero, sweet potato, fennel and red cabbage salad with tahini dressing

Warm cavolo nero salad

I love a salad, they’re just delicious. I don’t make them for weight loss purposes, let’s be honest, a salad can be just as calorific and full of naughty things as any other meal. I eat them all year round and now as the days are getting colder, I have started to move more on to warm salads. Sweet potato is often what I go to as I feel like you can put it in practically any kind of salad or meal!  The star of this dish though is the cavolo nero. If you’re a cabbage fan, this is the salad for you as there is also red cabbage in this salad.  What I find strange about cavolo nero, is that it looks quite thin and leafy, yet actually it’s really robust and can be quite tough, particularly around the stems. It take surprisingly long for it to break down and become soft to eat. So, you may think the instructions are little odd, but trust me, the cavolo nero needs a little extra cooking as compared the red cabbage.

Fennel is one of those vegetables I feel like I am only this year discovering, I love the flavour it imparts, it’s so distinctive yet doesn’t overpower.

Sometimes I throw in other vegetables in to this salad, I find courgette works particularly well and can be roasted in the oven with the potatoes (though chop quite chunkily else it will cook much faster than the sweet potato). Some walnuts or pine nuts sprinkled on top wouldn’t go amiss either.

This recipe is an adaption of one I found on another food blog here

Time: 1hr 15

Serves 3

Ingredients

• 1 medium to large sized sweet potato, peeled and chopped in to large dice (bitesize pieces)

• 1 red onion, peeled and cut in to wedges

• ½ fennel bulb, sliced across the bulb  quite thickly, around 1cm, the layers will fall apart and can be spread around the roasting tray

• Handful of cherry tomatoes, about 12

• 200g cavolo nero, roughly chopped 9in to about 1 inch wide pieces across the leaf

• ¼ red cabbage, sliced

• 2 tbsp tahini

• Juice of ½ a lemon

• Few tbsp of water

• Olive oil

• Salt and pepper

Method

1. Pre-heat oven to 200c.

2. Add the diced sweet potato, sliced red onion and sliced fennel to a baking tray and toss in about 1 tablespoon of olive oil with some salt and pepper.  Roast for about 45 minutes.

3. Mix the tahini dressing by mixing the tahini with the lemon juice and stirring. It will become thick like houmous, just add a few tablespoons of water until you get the consistency you want, similar to cream. Season with a  crack of salt and pepper.   Set aside

4. About 15 minutes before the end, toss the veg and add in the cherry tomatoes for the last 15 minutes of cooking.

5. Heat a large pan with about 1 tbsp olive oil and toss the cavolo nero in it then gently fry. Cover with a lid and let it cook for about 5 minutes.

6. Add in the red cabbage, stir and cover with the leid again for another 5 minutes. By the end everything should be cooked through.

7. When the roasting vegetables are done, add them to the pan and gently toss with a spoonful or two of the dressing then plate up. Finish with a final drizzle of the dressing.