Endive and Seasonal Fruit Salad with Raspberry Vinaigrette
Serves 6

Salad Ingredients
1 pound red endives
1 pound white endives
1/2 c. coarsely chopped walnuts, toasted
3 each, medium apples or pears
2 T fresh lemon juice
1 c. fresh raspberries
1/2 c. fresh blueberries
1/2 t. salt
6 leaves of leaf lettuce

Roast walnuts for 15 minutes in a 275-degree oven. Quarter apples or pears lengthwise, then core and thinly slice. Immediately toss well with lemon juice and salt to prevent discoloring.

Cut 2/3 of red and white endives in half lengthwise. Remove the cores and slice into long thin strips. Pull the whole leaves off the remaining endives and reserve.

In a large bowl, combine sliced endives, toasted nuts, apple or pear slices and berries. Toss with vinaigrette (see recipe below).

Place one lettuce leaf on each plate. Arrange the whole endive leaves around the plate perimeter, alternating red and white leaves. Place a portion of dressed salad on each lettuce leaf.

Dressing Ingredients
1/2 cu. Raspberry vinegar
1 t. sugar
1/2 t. freshly ground pepper
1/2 t. ground cinnamon
1/4 c. crushed raspberries, fresh or thawed frozen
1 c. olive oil

Whisk together vinegar, sugar, pepper and cinnamon. Add crushed berries and oil. Whisk until emulsified.
 
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  California Vegetable Specialties

It can be a lonely business, growing endive in the United States. Especially when everyone has told you it can’t be done in California’s hot, dry climate. But Rich Collins got an inspiration and he didn’t give up.

Rich was a city boy with dreams of becoming a farmer. In 1978 the chef at a restaurant where he worked as a dishwasher while he was attending high school made braised endive one night. When he told Rich that he had paid $4 a pound for it, an idea was born. “The very next day I planted chicory seeds in my garden!” Rich recalls. “The culinary result that autumn was a very bitter, though satisfying, salad.”

Finding information to help him improve his crop was almost impossible in the US, so in January 1982 on his 22nd birthday Rich took off for Europe, where endive is a culinary staple, to learn all he could. Returning to California, he finished his degree in agricultural and managerial economics at U.C. Davis and began full-time commercial farming of endive on 5 acres near Vacaville with the help of local farmer Ton Lum. He called it Rebel Farms, because he was defying all the cynics who doubted the wisdom of his idea. The first harvest was Thanksgiving Day, 1983.

In 1984 when Rich married Shelly, they served endive salad to 400 guests, using most of that year’s production. But she joined in his commitment to produce high-quality endive in the US. “Progress was slow in the beginning. Because of the natural agricultural cycles,” Rich explains, “once you identify a shortcoming or a mistake, you often have to wait 12 months to attempt a solution.”

At this time Rich was corresponding with a grower in Spain, José Miguel Arias Lopez, who gave him a lot of helpful advice. José and French grower Marc Darbonne visited Rebel Farms, and a year later they proposed a collaboration that would bring the most up-to-date endive farming know-how from Europe to California, a partnership that became California Vegetable Specialties.

Through good times and tough times, Marc Darbonne was a constant source of expertise and encouragement. Still the only American producer of endive, Rich has diversified locations and crops, adding endigia as well as certified organic endive. “I just absolutely was not going to quit,” Rich says, with justifiable pride. “I knew we could make CVS a reliable source of superior quality endive. And we have.”

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