Roasted Lemon & Butternut Salad w/ Browned Butter Sauce
It’s weird being an Australian this time of year. My instagram feed is filled with images of snow falling, log fireplaces, mulled wine and roasted everything. Which are all things I LOVE but I have to admit they feel slightly jarring against our 30˚C + blue sky days.
It’s an odd sensation of being torn between two worlds. Christmas somehow feels simultaneously like the season of building snowmen while eating toasted marshmallows and the season of slathering on sunscreen and heading to the beach with a half-frozen beer in one hand and a lurid pink flamingo inflatable pool toy in the other. How to reconcile these conflicting fantasies? Two options. First, just turn the aircon on and guzzle all mulled wine you want anyway. OR, straddle both realities; roast your veggies to caramelised perfection then just stick them in a bowl with lettuce, tomatoes and onion and call it a ‘warm salad’.
Warm salads are delightful (great for picnics!) and probably the reason for a lot of failed health kicks. See, anything can go in a warm salad. As long as you’ve got the foundation of lettuce/kale/rocket/green stuff and maybe one other fresh vegetable you can pile on toasted buttery croutons, hunks of grilled haloumi, oily chargrilled eggplant, roasted pumpkin - really anything you want, until the dish is definitely more ‘dairy-fat-and-roasted-root-vegetable’ than ‘crispy-healthy-fresh-and-virtuous’, but it’s still a salad so everyone can shut up and let you drizzle on that browned butter sauce.
Incidentally, about that browned butter sauce. Browning does something magical to butter: it turns it from an ingredient that is - admittedly - already delicious, into this nutty, fragrant, caramelised dream syrup flirtatiously dancing a fine line between sweetness and savouriness. And the tart and zesty, almost caramelised roasted lemon cuts right through it. Mmmm. Make this sauce often. Slather it over grilled fish, drizzle it on a crumbed roast pumpkin, you could mayyyybe even swirl it through greek yoghurt or garlic mayo for some kinda crazy roast potato dipping sauce (if it’s summer, just turn the aircon back on and you can roast all the potatoes you want as well). In fact, maybe that’s the moral of my story. As long as you have air-conditioning, butterhead lettuce and the ability to pretend that indulgent winter foods are actually fresh summer salads, you can sail through life eating absolutely everything you want every hour of the day, every season of the year. Which is probably the main point of life after all.
Roasted Lemon & Butternut Salad w/ Browned Butter Sauce
Serves 3-4
Ingredients
1/2 a butternut pumpkin, cut into 1cm thick rounds (~600-700g)
9 yellow squash, quartered (~150g)
1 lemon, cut into 1cm thick rounds
1 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 a red onion, sliced into thin rounds
2 cup of cherry tomatoes, cut in half
1 small head of lettuce (about 4 cups - go for a variety like butterhead or little gem), roughly torn
1/2 cup soft feta cheese (something smooth and crumbly like Persian feta - I use this one)
For the browned butter sauce
1/4 cup butter
2 cloves garlic, finely diced
3 Tbsp white vinegar
3 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
6 Tbsp olive oil
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp brown sugar
1/2 tsp mustard powder
Method
Toss the pumpkin slices, squash and lemon slices in the olive oil and spread out over 2 baking trays. Sprinkle with a few generous pinches of salt and place in the oven at 180˚C for 40 minutes or until the pumpkin, squash and lemon have softened and started to brown and caramelise at the edges. Remove from oven and let cool to room temperature. Tear the lemon slices into quarters.
For the browned butter sauce, put the butter in a small saucepan over moderate heat, let melt and cook until the butter turns a golden brown colour and has a nutty aroma. Remove from the heat and let cool slightly. Pour into a big jug, add the remaining sauce ingredients and blitz with a hand held blender until a smooth dressing forms.
In a large bowl, combine the red onion, cherry tomatoes, lettuce, and roasted vegetables, crumble the feta on top, drizzle over the browned butter sauce and top with cracked pepper before serving.
Note: the roasted lemon slices looked so pretty so I left them whole, but they do have a strong flavour so if you decide not to chop yours up, advise guests not to eat them all in a single mouthful! A modest little bite of lemon tastes delicious with the sweet roasted pumpkin and creamy feta.
