Classic Autumn apple salad with raisins, nuts and honey.
Waldorf Salad
By Sue Lau | Palatable Pastime
This month for #ImprovCookingChallenge, a group of bloggers posting on unique topics that change each month, the theme celebrates Autumn with the combination of apples and honey. I happened to have this recipe for Waldorf salad which uses apples and honey in my files, so decided it would be a perfect time to share it.
The Waldorf salad is actually a historic one, dating back to the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, made by the chef at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City. The first version did not contain nuts, but like many a popular recipe, it evolved to have those as well as other ingredients over time, including things like chicken and dried fruits or raisins. These later versions may have contributed to the variety of chicken and turkey salad recipes in recent years which also use raisins or fresh grapes among other things.
Over the past few decades, I have seen Waldorf salad bump into other fruit salads as well, including those that are similar to Ambrosia salad. So as fruit salads with apples go, it has been a great starting point for many ideas to propound our food culture with fruit salads in general. Older salads that used more gelatin are now less popular as they have fallen out of vogue on the food scene.
Today, many fruit salads often contain cooked grains such a quinoa and kamut along with other nuts and seeds as part of a clean eating regime, but the classic retro Waldorf salad remains eternally popular, especially in apple harvest season through Thanksgiving.
Join me later this week when I post with #SoupSwappers on Saturday with my recipe for lamb and vegetable soup made in the Instant Pot on the pressure cooker setting. I have been having a lot of fun using the Instant Pot, and if you are looking for new recipe ideas to use with it, this one will be perfect for you.
Waldorf Salad
Yield: 2 quarts
Ingredients:
- Juice of one lemon
- 2 pounds apples, peeled, cored, and chopped
- 1 rib celery, finely diced
- 1 cup shelled toasted walnuts, chopped
- 1/2 cup golden raisins
- 1/2 cup light mayonnaise
- 1/4 cup fat free sour cream
- 2 tablespoons honey
Method:
- Toss apples in lemon juice then stir with remaining ingredients.
From the kitchen of palatablepastime.com
More Apple and Honey Recipes:
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Don’t you love when a theme fits a recipe you’ve got and not blogged yet? I’m involved now in so many groups that I often just sit on a recipe until a theme is chosen for which I can use it. This salad recipe is a classic and now I have a hankering for it.
Good apple picking right now. And I know what you mean about sitting on a recipe–problem is, isn’t it funny I can have a couple hundred tucked away like a squirrel for winter, but let an event come up and (you guessed it) not a single recipe fits. LOL! Soups, fish, Bundt cakes, breads and muffins are all in hot demand in my storage files. But you and I both can cook like whirlwinds.
I can’t believe I’ve never had this. I’ve heard of it and like all of the ingredients, just never put them together. I need to remedy that.
Good time to try it with apple picking season going on.