Shaved Fennel Salad with Avocado & Lemon

Meet spring in a bowl: shaved fennel and asparagus, sliced avocado, chopped parsley, red onion, dried currants, and parmesan all dressed with lemon juice and olive oil.

Forgive me if I say this too often: I could eat this salad every day.

But I mean it: the combination of textures and flavors just tastes so fresh. It’s raw and crisp meets creamy and rich meets sharp and sweet… a foolproof formula, really.

As you might imagine, this salad makes most sense as a side dish — I’ve been serving it aside these black lentils with spinach — but it’s amazingly filling and satisfying on its own. With a hunk of bread on the side, I can call dinner done.

The recipe comes from Stacy Adimando’s Piatti, a cookbook all about plates and platters for sharing inspired by Italy, which I am loving. When the book arrived, I made the roasted escarole with labne and pistachios, which was incredibly delicious, and a few days later, when my parents were visiting, I made the above-mentioned black lentils, which, incidentally, are garnished with buratta.

Days after my parents left, each texted me separately about the lentils — Friends, these lentils are memorable — and each sent along photo-evidence of the lentils continuing to be enjoyed back in CT.

Stacy, if you are unfamiliar, is the editor-in-chief of Saveur and the co-author of a number of cookbooks including the James Beard Award-winning Nopalito. She comes from a big American family of Southern Italian lineage, and knows a thing or two about assembling “generous, abundant, rustic, and seasonal” spreads to feed the masses.

I’ll share more about Stacy and Piatti when I get that  lentil recipe up, but first:

A Few Notes About This Fennel Salad:

• A mandoline is not essential, but I find it very helpful for slicing the fennel thinly. I recently bought a new Benriner mandoline — my old one was ancient — and wow: what a difference. Highly recommend: $34. It comes with a guard, too. What I love about using a mandoline for this recipe, is that there’s no need to core the fennel bulbs — when shaved thinly, the core is fine left intact.
• If you soak the currants in a little bit of hot water and vinegar — this is something I learned from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook — they will soften/plump up a bit.
• The original recipe calls for snap peas, which I used, and which I loved. Snap peas, however, can be tricky — when they’re good, they’re amazing; when they’re not good, they’re stringy and tough. When I couldn’t find good snap peas, I subbed in raw, shaved asparagus, and they worked beautifully. Later in the summer, raw, shaved zucchini will be a nice option here, too.
• Swap in other herbs for the parsley: mint, chives, or dill would all work nicely here.

Stacy Adimando’s Piatti:

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