This salad’s flavor is built around bitter greens, sweet fruit, and crunchy nuts—if you follow those flavors as a guide line you make the salad many different ways. You could swap endive for the watercress, clementines for the pomegranate, and toasted hazelnuts for the sunflower seeds. Or I might use chicory for a bitter green, grapefruit for the fruit, and fried shallots for the crunch. Watercress is easy to find year round and pairs well with bright, sweet-sour pomegranate seeds are in-season in the winter, and toasted sunflower seeds add the crunch. Adding pomegranate molasses or juice to the vinaigrette amplifies the pomegranate flavor from the seeds in the salad. Although I usually only make salad dressing with extra-virgin olive oil, when using nuts in a salad, I sometimes swap out the nut’s oil—in this case, a cold-pressed sunflower oil. Be careful with nut oils however; they turn rancid quickly. Once opened, I keep the bottle in my fridge and use it quickly. <br /> <br /> <br />I like to get whatever greens I am using super crisp by cleaning them in very cold water, draining them gently in a colander and then wrapping them in a dry cloth, which absorbs the residual moisture and keeps the greens protected while sitting in the fridge for at least an hour and up to overnight. <br />

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