Pear & Goat Cheese Salad with Meyer Lemon Dijon Dressing

Back in January i shared this recipe on uncommon designs, i’m a food contributor once a month over there and i’ve had such a great time sharing fun recipes with their readers.  With spring basically upon us i’ve had a renewed desire to eat more greens and salads- i can’t wait to get down to the farmers market in the next couple of weeks and snatch up some of the early fresh spring lettuces and asparagus. This is one of my standard go to salads, its simple and can be made pretty much year round although the meyer lemons tend to be in season more in the winter and early spring.

 Mixed Green, Pear & Warm Goat Cheese Salad

Ingredients:

mixed greens

a pear (your favorite variety, i like bosc), thinly sliced

candied walnuts

craisins

goat cheese (you can buy small little 4 oz logs at your grocery store’s finer cheese section)

Preheat your oven to 350. Prepare the salad by topping your mixed greens with the walnuts, craisins and thin slices of pear.  Cut the goat cheese into 1/2″ rounds and place on a silpat (nonstick baking mat) or a piece of parchment paper.  Pop it in the oven for 4-5 minutes, when its warm you will see that the texture has changed its kind of shiny.  Take it out of the oven, slide the rounds off the paper onto your salad, top with dressing (meyer lemon & dijon recipe below) and serve immediately.  The best thing about the warm goat cheese is that it basically melts into your salad as you mix it with the dressing and creates an creamy-ness to it that is so good.

If you are unfamiliar with meyer lemons they are basically a cross between a regular lemon and an orange, they aren’t quite as bitter as a regular lemon and just a tad sweet, which in my opinion makes them perfect to mix into a salad dressing.

Meyer Lemon & Dijon Dressing

Ingredients

1/2 cup olive oil

juice from 1 meyer lemon

1 tablespoon dijon mustard

1 tablespoon sugar

S&P to taste

Whisk all ingredients together and put into a container to serve, i like to put mine in a container that i can shake before serving because the mustard tends to settle. You can keep this dressing up to 2 weeks in the fridge.

Bring on spring and fresh eating!! 🙂