A Fresh and Bitter Passover Salad

Our evening Bible study has some amazing people in it. It was decided that we would have a Passover Seder dinner on our usual Wednesday night get together last week to more clearly understand and celebrate this Jewish tradition. We all signed up to bring food or other elements important to the Passover traditions.

I loved the idea of making a big salad for all of us. My online search indicated it should include fresh spring green ingredients - as hopeful signs, as well as the bitter ones - as reminders of the time the Israelis were in the bondage of slavery in Egypt.

For salad dressing, the type they recommended was almost identical to the Lemon-EVOO Salad Dressing I created years ago! I've revised that one a bit to now be a 2-1 ratio of EVOO-Lemon juice, a splash of white Balsamic vinegar and varying the seasonings depending on the salad, time of year, or what's in your spice cabinet at the moment. 

I recently ordered some special soap made with olive oil from the area near Israel. I'm really interested in all uses of extra virgin olive oil (lotions, soaps, etc.) after reading of its health benefits.

In my kitchen, I've now almost completely eliminated other oils, butter and ghee, switching to this amazing liquid 'fat' for all my cooking and baking. So. . .I wondered if there was any EVOO produced in that area that was available online. Yes there was! I found some made from olives in an olive grove only 50 miles north of The Mount of Olives!

I chopped-sliced the vegetables shown in the bowl in the first photo. Green cabbage, kale, radishes, cucumbers, purple cabbage, green onions, some purple onion, celery - heart stalks and tops. I also bought a beautiful bunch of parsley, washed it - wrapped it in a clean dish towel, put it in the 'fridge - then totally forgot to use it. 

For dressing this salad, I used the oil in the bottle on the right in the 2nd photo above, putting all the ingredients into a quart jar, starting with that 2-1 ratio - 1c of EVOO and 1/2c of lemon juice. Next add: dry dill, garlic-fermented in honey, some brown mustard, Himalayan pink salt and a mix of black and cayenne pepper. The mustard was instead of horseradish which is a traditional part of a Seder dinner for bitterness. The garlic honey was both bitter and sweet. Once everything is in the jar, blend it with an immersion blender until totally smooth. I hope you all had a very Happy Easter or Passover. . .Lin