This healthy radicchio and fennel salad on flatbread is a great, quick recipe in a pinch

Salad season is approaching. It’s the time of year when we go from heavy to light foods, hot to cool, and let’s not kid ourselves here, it’s because we’re wearing less, poolside and otherwise, or we want to.

So we salad as much as possible, one leafy forkful at a time, pushing aside sandwiches and other things that seem more interesting than another plate heaped with greens, because truthfully, they are. Salads can be boring things.

But what about salads disguised as something else? Salads eaten in ways you might not expect?

I had what was basically a salad inside of a spring roll at a Thai place not long ago – they were called “salad rolls” because that’s all they were, lettuce wrapped in rice paper. They were okay, but I thought they could’ve been better. After that, I began to imagine other ways to present salads and I came up with all sorts of ideas. Salads, turns out, don’t have to be so predictable and dull.

They also don’t have to just be a bunch of lettuce, although I’ve made and eaten plenty of salads that are just that – lettuce with a simple vinaigrette – and served at the end of a meal in France. These salads aren’t meant to be anything fancy. You eat them and move on to the cheese course. Or maybe you skip the cheese and go right to something chocolate (raising hand here).

My point is a salad can be that simple, or it can be something else.

For one recipe, I made an easy homemade flatbread and heaped it with a salad of thinly sliced radicchio and fennel; more of a slaw, really. The anise-flavored fennel and the slightly bitter radicchio took well to a balsamic vinaigrette. I added tons of Parmigiano on top of it all. You can never have too much of that.

Funny thing is, all of the salad talk has gotten me thinking about skillet cookies – you know, making one big cookie in a skillet instead of a batch of several dozen. With all the calories I’ve saved by eating salads all week, I feel like I deserve it. It’s just one cookie, after all.

Ellise Pierce is the Cowgirl Chef and author of COWGIRL CHEF: Texas Cooking with a French Accent (Running Press). Read her blog (www.cowgirlchef.com), and follow her on Twitter (@cowgirlchef) and Instagram (cowgirlchef).

A version of this recipe previously published in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

This story was originally published March 7, 2022 at 12:11 PM with the headline "This healthy radicchio and fennel salad on flatbread is a great, quick recipe in a pinch."