homegrown and homemade...fennel and radicchio salad

radicchio in the garden

I'm an intuitive cook, to me that means, I use recipes for inspiration but do my own thing. I rarely measure unless I'm baking, then I measure carefully. This recipe from Epicurious for Fennel and Radicchio Salad is excellent; so if you need directions and measurements follow it. What I have here is a little picture tutorial of my own way for a similar salad. In fact, I didn't use radicchio because I didn't have any at the time. I substituted red cabbage from our garden that I pressed to soften.

Split the red cabbage in half lengthwise.

Chop up a half a head of red cabbage and toss with salt.

Let it sit for a few hours and squeezed the excess water out of the cabbage.

Chop up the fennel lengthwise after removing the ferny stems.

(I threw these in the freezer to use for making a vegetable broth at a later time.)

Get a cute little shallot.

Chop into small pieces.

Squeeze the juice out of half of a lemon and poured that over the shallot in a small bowl.

And pour enough olive oil over the shallot-lemon mixture.

Add several pitted kalamata olives to the fennel and pour the olive oil mixture on top.

When the cabbage is pressed, add that to the bowl and mix all the ingredients together.

Enjoy!