This was one of several recipes I did while staying on a houseboat in Amsterdam. I get quite creative when I'm there. It's not a Dutch recipe, but an example of the kind of thing I often cook while I'm in Holland. I don't go to Europe very often, but when I do, it's often to Amsterdam and when I'm there, I like to take advantage of the ready availability of a variety of top-notch ingredients that I don't often get my hands on: euro-ingredients. I enjoy the variety of different salad leaves which are available and you can chose between Greek, Italian or Spanish olive oil. Fresh herbs, too: basil, thyme, sage and rosemary.... but all this comes at a price, I know. Fruit and vegetables are genetically selected to look better than they taste, various methods of preserving - nitrogen packaging and stuff like that - are widely used to ensure that the whole EU has daily supplies of consistent quality. Everything has food-miles built into the price or subsidised. But there are alternatives. In Holland you can easily find locally produced organic vegetables, even in supermarkets. They still often have a slightly unrealistic, uniform, unblemished appearance, which I find suspicious, but they usually taste good.
The inspiration for this recipe comes from a visit to one of the newer member states of the EU: Latvia. We went to a sleepy seaside town on the Baltic called Liepaja and I was served an avocado, grapefruit and blue cheese salad in Pasnieka Maja Restorans, which means the Post House Restaurant, because it is situated in a lovely old wooden building which was once the post master's house. Liepaja is a quietly poor town on the whole and although we found the prices in Pasnieka Maja Restorans and others of a similar nature fairly reasonable, I suspect that they would be considered quite steep compared to local standards. The food was excellent: well cooked with fresh ingredients. Perhaps in an effort to add extra value for money, or at least to justify the prices, careful attention had been given to the presentation of all the dishes we had. Big white plates with little color-coordinated sculptures in the centre and carefully placed salad leaves, squiggles of sauces and sprinklings of herbs around the edge. This is something I don't do well and I'm not going to go into here, but the salad which inspired this recipe was a work of art. It also had pears in it, which I've chosen to leave out. Their sauce was richer and creamier than mine, too - I suspect it contained cream. But here's what I did, and I can say that since I've tasted both salads and am thus in a position to compare, mine was no worse, except perhaps in it's presentation.
1 avocado
1 grapefruit
A bunch of mixed leaves (roccola, lettuce, spinach and stuff)
About 40g of blue Stilton cheese (or any other blue cheese)
A handful of croutons
A splash of olive oil
Salt
The first thing to do, is put the cheese in a cup with a splash of olive oil and mash it up a bit. Leave the mixture to soak while you do the rest of the salad. Wash and drain the leaves and arrange them on a salad plate. Cut the grapefruit in half and peel and chop one half (peel all the white stuff right off - it has a bitter taste and unpleasant texture). Save the pieces on a plate until the avocado is ready. Peel the avocado by cutting through the skin from end to end six times and then pulling the strips off. Halve the fruit, de seed it, then cut it into chunks. Sprinkle the croutons over the leaves, then lay the avocado in a layer over the top, then layer the grapefruit over the avocado.
Squeeze some of the grapefruit juice into the cheese and oil mix and beat well with a fork. Add more juice a little at a time until you have a sauce with a thick creamy texture. Season the sauce with salt and pour over the salad.
Serve immediately.