Here’s another quick post. A few days ago, my ministry group had a casual Christmas potluck/get-together. Given that many of us were exhausted from attending a retreat over the weekend as well as a birthday celebration, we decided to keep it pretty low-key. For that reason, I decided to make something simple, a pear apple salad with pork floss, which was loosely adapted from this recipe from the blog, Eat Cho Food. This recipe caught my eye because I’ve never seen a salad with pork floss before.

I would’ve made the recipe to the letter if it weren’t so hard to find fuyu persimmons or frisée. Both Whole Foods AND 99 Ranch failed me. I’m not sure what’s going on with the trend of multiple grocery markets running out of stuff or not carrying certain items but it’s annoying that this has affected me at least a few times at this point now.

So here were some substitutions in case if vaguely/slightly exotic foods can’t be found:

• If you don’t have frisée, use baby arugula or baby kale or something that’s peppery/bitter. I used baby kale this time.
• If you don’t have persimmons, just top off with more pears and apples.
• If you don’t have pistachios, pine nuts or even walnuts work. I had a bag of walnuts to burn through so I used walnuts this time. As always, toast your nuts, it’s worth the effort.

Because it’s a salad, this dish came together pretty quickly and easily. I. dumped some baby kale in a bowl and added slices of Asian pears and Fuji apples. I then sprinkled in a VERY generous helping of pork floss and toasted crushed walnut pieces.

The dressing was merely 4 ingredients–Kewpie mayo, honey, rice vinegar, and dijon mustard. It did taste a little sour to me, something that alerted me that a lot of vinegar was added. I tried to balance it out by adding more honey and black pepper so the vinegar wasn’t the main overpowering flavor. I think I could’ve even added more olive oil as another alternative too.

I dressed the salad lightly and tossed it before re-topping with some fresh apple/pear slices, pork slice, and more walnuts and drizzled a bit of the dressing on top.

The taste of this was interesting but grew on me. The acidity of the vinegar-y dressing paired with the sweetness of fruit and the pork floss ended up tasting pretty dang good, even refreshing in some ways to balance out the other rich food I was eating that night. Personally, this is one of those salads that ended up being a “low effort, high reward” dish for me. Who knew pork floss in salad could taste so good? People should use pork floss as a salad topping more often. It could be the next bacon or prosciutto topping. With some tweaks to the dressing, I think this salad could easily become a very convenient last-minute potluck dish–quick to put together with minimal ingredients, just adventurous enough, and pretty dang good.