A lovely French vinaigrette with apple cider vinegar to balance tastes for this seasonal vegetables and fruit mixed salad. The perfect quick summer meal.
Here is a mixed salad I love to prepare in Summer, with both sweet and savory flavors. Make it your own, there are many adaptations you can imagine from this simple recipe, according to your taste or ingredients you can find.
The recipe possible adaptations
- Salad: Here arugula or rocket. Switch for baby spinach, lamb’s lettuce, mesclun or any salad of your choice.
- Yellow peaches make a nice contrast of colors and flavors. I also love white nectarines. For the quantities I chose to have ¾ peach per serve as I don’t want this salad to be too sweet.
- Feta cheese is my favorite. Burrata should also be perfect. A friend made my recipe with fresh goat cheese, I have to try it out.
- As for seeds, I’m a big fan of pine nuts, which I picked up when I was a kid under the pines in Cannes, in South-France Provence, at my grandparents’ house. I use to spend hours there crushing with a stone the pine cones and shells surrounding the pine nuts, coming back with black hands (and often dirty clothes!), but a wide smile on my face and a bag filled with my treasure. The possible other seeds to use: cashew nuts, hazelnuts, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds… Pine nuts can also be roasted in a pan or in the oven.
- Dressing You’re on a French food blog, so a vinaigrette is what you want for this recipe. I used apple cider vinegar as I think it’s great for this recipe, much better that wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar. I used moutarde en grains à l’ancienne as we call it old-fashion grainy mustard. But Dijon mustard is fine too. As for oil, olive oil is my favorite for most vinaigrettes, but rapeseed oil is fine too, or a mix of equal part or olive oil and rapeseed oil.
A few French words of this recipe
Vinaigrette : olive oil = huile d’olive ; apple cider vinegar = vinaigre de cidre ; grainy mustard = moutarde en grains
Salad : Arugula or rocket = roquette ; peach = pèche ; shallot = échalote ; pine nut = pignon de pin ; toss salad = mélanger la salade.
A fun fact in French we like to say “fatiguer la salade” . Fatiguer means getting tired. Tossing salad with vinaigrette before serving generally makes the vegetable less fress this is why we say salad gets a bit tired.
Note that I used both British English and American English, I do my best to improve my English but for a French like me those differences are a bit confusing and I never know which word to use, sorry.
Arugula / Rocket and Peach Salad with Apple Cider Vinaigrette
Ingredients
Mixed salad
- 1 salad : arugula or rocket lamb's lettuce, mesclun, baby spinach …
- 3 peaches use 2 to 4 yellow peaches depending on their size
- 1 shallot
- 100 gr feta cheese
- 2 handfuls pine nuts
VINAIGRETTE
- 1 teaspoon mustard use grainy mustard
- 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
Instructions
PREPARE VINAIGRETTE
- In a bowl, place granny mustard, pour apple cider vinegar and stir. Then add the olive oil and mix again.
- Peel shallot and finely mince it. Add those in the vinaigrette and combine.
PREPARE MIXED SALAD
- Rinse salad and peaches.
- Peel peaches and cut into thin quarters. Cube feta cheese.
- Toss arugula / rocket with dressing in a bowl.
- Arrange individual plates or place in a salad bowl : first place salad with dressing, then peach slices and feta cheese. Sprinkle pine nuts. Eventually pour remaining vinaigrette over or serve in a bowl aside.