Grill

I love a composed salad, with ingredients separately prepped and layered on the plate in a fine fusion of flavor and color. While most types of lettuce stand up poorly to heat, radicchio is remarkably resilient. Doused with a good quality olive oil and flash-flamed over a grill, radicchio loses its bitter bite to impart a sweet, smokey complexity to the salad. Paired with the crunch of shaved fennel and slices of juicy Bartlett pear, topped with pistachios and blackberries, and you have a summer salad that needs little more than a fresh herb dressing. For those last-of-summer pickings from the garden, I’ve taken a few sprigs of fresh oregano, thyme and rosemary, whisked them with olive oil and lemon, and there you have it. A summer salad made simple.

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