Shaved fennel salad with mustard vinaigrette and Marcona almonds

We've made this a few times.  It is a complex little salad, with sweet, nutty, bitter, and herbal flavors.  Definitely a palate cleanser.  This is tweaked just slightly from Workin' —More Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter, which is a cookbook we love.  Choose the greens you love best.  If you don't like bitter greens, for example, omit the endive (which is probably my preference), but keep a nice mix so the salad doesn't get too one-dimensional.

The next time we make this, we'll use the Austrian pear cider vinegar that Nat gave us.  It would be absolutely perfect.  

Makes 4 servings.

INGREDIENTS

Mustard vinaigrette:

• ½ cup extra virgin olive oil
  
• 2 tablespoons whole grain mustard
  
• 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar
  
• ¼ cup fennel fronds
  

Salad:

• 2 cups fennel, shaved
  
• 1½ cup firmly packed mixed baby greens
  
• 1 each Belgian endive, julienned
  
• 1 cup yellow and red teardrop tomatoes, quartered
  
• 1 cup Asian pear, diced ¼-inch
  
• ½ cup Marcona almonds, toasted and coarsely chopped
  
• ½ cup fennel fronds, cut for garnish
• Fresh ground black pepper or white pepper

DIRECTIONS

Prepare the vinaigrette: Combine the olive oil, mustard, white wine vinegar and fennel fronds and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Prepare the salad: For a nicely composed presentation, gently toss the fennel, baby greens, and endive with the two or three tablespoons of the vinaigrette just prior to serving.  Drizzle about 1 teaspoon of olive oil on each plate and spoon the mustard vinaigrette in a circle.  Arrange the salad in the center of the circle, and sprinkle the pear, tomatoes, and almonds around the salad, and decorate with fennel fronds.  For a simpler plating, gently toss the fennel, baby greens, and endive with all of the vinaigrette just prior to serving, and sprinkle over the remaining ingredients.

Wine Notes

This salad, with its complex, herbal and slightly bitter notes, along with the mustard and pear, makes it natural with a grüner veltliner from Austria.  In fact, it's such a nice match that i can still remember the first time we made this salad maybe four or five years ago: we Ron and Judy Sandgren were over for dinner, and we served this with a 1996 Bründlmayer grüner veltliner Ried Lamm.  Each thing makes the other more memorable.