After the indulgence of Friday’s lemon drizzle cake, it’s time for a big green salad, guys! I’m one of those lucky souls that happens to like salad (imaginative salad, may I add – not the iceberg lettuce, anaemic tomato and cucumber kind, mind you). If my meal isn’t accompanied by a decent portion of salad or greens, I have this nagging feeling that something is missing. I’ll admit, I also have trouble understanding people who dislike vegetables.

I have my mum to thank for that as she, a bit of a salad queen in our house, has rammed it into my brother’s and my head that eating veggies is a thing. Unless I finished my entire meal, even the dreaded mushy garlicky spinach, I wasn’t getting as much as a sniff of a dessert, nothing at all, nada! As much as I tried to rebel, it simply wasn’t going to fly…and not having a dessert was the greatest punishment of all, so I was not going to risk that happening. Little by little eating veggies has become a habit and now I find that I crave them.

Today’s salad is made up of stuff that I had lying around in my kitchen. I was planning to go shopping for this recipe, but then I decided that I shall not be adding to the pile of vegetables, which was already threatening to die on me if I didn’t put it to use. I am a bit of a food hoarder at heart (I get way more excited than is socially acceptable by beautiful fruit and veg) and my eyes are bigger than my stomach (true fact) and I hate waste – what a great combo of character traits, eh. It’s a good job I don’t have to put up with myself, like, all the time! So I often tend to buy way too much perishable food and then I almost kill myself trying to preserve it all and ram it into my creaking fridge.

This salad is a crunchy little number made up of fennel, celery ribs, radishes, rocket and pickled onion tossed in a toasted walnut dressing that steals the show. It’s crunchy, fresh and perfect for this almost (if not for the overcast skies today) spring-like weather. Enjoy!