Celeriac, grape and apple salad with goat’s cheese, thyme and sunflowe

Celeriac, grape and apple salad with goat’s cheese, thyme and sunflower seeds

Winter

Cooking has lots to do with confidence. When I’m teaching people to cook, I always encourage them to have a go at new combinations or experiment with ingredients they might not have used before. When I talk about a specific ingredient, I always try to describe, in words, how it tastes.
I try to describe its texture and how it makes me feel when I eat it, and sometimes I explain the memories and associations I have with it. This salad whisks me back to an English vineyard, after the last harvest. I made it for all the pickers, with grapes straight from the vine and celeriac from the farm next door.

Serves 4

Ingredients

2 tbsp sunflower seeds
½ small or ¼ larger celeriac, peeled
2 dessert apples, quartered, cored and cut into thin wedges
2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
Juice of 1 lemon
A couple of handfuls of red grapes
75g (2½oz) soft goat’s cheese, crumbled
2 thyme sprigs, leaves stripped
2 tsp runny honey
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

Place a dry frying pan on a medium heat. Add the sunflower seeds and cook, stirring regularly, for a few minutes, until the seeds are toasted and fragrant. Set aside.

Using a large, sharp knife, cut the celeriac into thin matchsticks. There is no right or wrong way to do this – it takes time, but the more you practise, the more likely you are to devise your own effective technique. You can, of course, use a mandoline fitted with a matchstick-slicing blade, but these sinister contraptions can be unnerving. You can also, I have seen, get clever vegetable peelers that produce neat, ready-to-go matchsticks with each drag over the veg. Clever stuff.

Toss the celeriac matchsticks with the apple wedges, half the olive oil and half the lemon juice, and season with some salt and pepper. This dresses the components, but also prevents the apple and celeriac from browning.

Choose a large serving platter or four individual starter plates. Scatter the apple and celeriac mixture equally over the plate(s), followed by the grapes, crumbled cheese and toasted seeds. Sprinkle over the thyme leaves.

Trickle over the runny honey, spritz with the remaining lemon juice and trickle over the remaining olive oil. Season with salt and pepper and bring to the table.

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