Pomegranate Wild Rice Salad

Ingredients:
vinaigrette:
3 tablespoons pomegranate juice or PAMA
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon red wine vinegar
salt
pepper


salad:
2 cups cooked wild rice, cooled
1 cup thinly sliced fennel
1 cup pomegranate arils
1 shallot, very thinly sliced
1 stalk celery, very thinly sliced

Directions:
Whisk together the vinaigrette in a small bowl. Set aside. Toss together the salad ingredients. Stir in vinaigrette. Serve at room temperature.

Quick Tips: If you have one, a mandoline makes quick work of thinly slicing the vegetables. I bought this inexpensive mandoline last year and it works well.

I like to make the wild rice for this salad the day before. Refrigerate it then fluff it with a fork before adding the remaining ingredients.

My thoughts:

This is a great late autumn or winter salad. Pomegranates are at their peak and fennel is widely available. A lot of recipes call for mixing wild rice (which actually isn't rice at all but a kind of marsh grass) with long grain rice but I prefer it by itself, especially in a salad. I love how the nutty flavor and chewy texture contrasts with the juicy pomegranate and crisp vegetables. I love the burst of flavor the arils provide. While I like it as a side salad, it is hearty enough to serve as main dish.

Wild Rice Medley

Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups broth (chicken, turkey, mushroom or vegetable would be good)
1 cup wild rice
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 medium onion, diced
1 large carrot, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
2 tablespoons dried porcini
1/2 teaspoon dried chervil
black pepper


Directions:
Place all ingredients in the slow cooker, stir. Cover and put on low for 4 hours then check to see if the kernels are open and tender. If not, recover and continue to cook until they are, checking about every 15 minutes to avoid overcooking. Stir and serve piping hot.

Note: If you don't have dried chervil, I think substituting parsley would be fine. Also, my rice was perfect at exactly 4 hours but I know there are some variations between slow cookers so you might need a longer cooking time.

Yield: about 6-8 servings (can be easily doubled)

My thoughts:

Thanksgiving is right around the corner and while it is always nice to share a meal with family and friends, Thanksgiving is a particularly stressful holiday when it comes to food because it really is the the focus of the entire day. Novice cooks or even experienced cooks that aren't used to cooking for a crowd have expressed to me how difficult it is to roast the turkey, make dessert and make a bunch of side dishes all at once and time everything perfectly.


With that in mind, I came up with this easy and tasty side dish that requires virtually none of your attention. Wild rice takes forever to make on the stove top so it seemed to me that it would be a perfect to adapt to the slow cooker and it worked wonderfully. The resulting side dish is classic enough to satisfy the traditionalist but is much more flavorful than the usual pilaf and as an added bonus gets a lot of its flavor from vegetables you are probably using in other dishes. The best part of course is that once you put all the ingredients in the slow cooker, you don't have to do a thing until it is ready to serve and you are not taking up a burner on the stove.