Hi! My name is Carlson, I’m a radio personality and I like to cook.

I make all these videos to bring friends and families and fellow foodies into the kitchen, and to demystify things you might have been afraid to try otherwise.

Today, we are making, and I’m not exaggerating, the greatest salad in the history of mankind. The salad is a two step process today. First of all with the dressing, we’ve got two shallots, finely chopped, three cloves of garlic, finely chopped, 1/3 cup of cider vinegar, 2/3 cup of real maple syrup, not Mrs. Butterworth, Mrs. Butterworth I love you, but not in recipes for waffles, now real maple syrup. We’ve got a Dijon mustard, this is great for pun, we’ve also got a course mustard, and of course salt and pepper to taste. As far as the nuts are concerned, you can use walnuts or pecans, these obviously are pecans, you’re going to use two to three cups of these. And you’re going to roast them at 3750 for around 15 minutes. Don’t want to make them too dark, but you do want to dry them out and make them crunchy. To season the pecans and to make them really heart healthy, I’m kidding of course, have a stick of butter. Yehey butter! 1 tablespoon of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper, two teaspoons of ground white pepper, 1 teaspoon of All Spice, about ½ a teaspoon of sea salt or Kosher salt, and two teaspoons of sugar.

All right, so I’ve let the nuts cool and I’m going to take the pecans, I’m going to put them in a plastic bag, please don’t put hot nuts out of the oven in a plastic bag. I think you know what’s going to happen. All right, so I’m going to drop them in this bag, the flavor that comes together with these is amazing, and everybody who I have ever spoken to says it’s the greatest salad they’ve ever had, so let’s go ahead and add our—let’s add our cinnamon, my white pepper, my All Spice, which adds a real sweetness to it. And finally, my cayenne pepper which is crazy good, if you like a little hot and a little sweet. Like my wife. Okay, here we go. With the melted butter, these are unreal. All right, so there they are, they’re well seasoned, what I’m going to do is I’m going to dump them back out on the tray here so they can kind of dry a little bit, because they’re still fairly warm, and I don’t want the moisture to make them soggy. Oh yes. Put them over here.

Let’s get started on that dressing. A nice bowl here, we’ll start out with my maple syrup. Going to add my vinegar. My shallots. My garlic. My Dijon. And my course country mustard. All right, let’s stir this up, add a little bit salt. And pepper. So our salad dressing is done, but not so ready. Then we’re going ahead and plate it. So I’ve got some nice basic field greens. You can use almost any kind of lettuce you want to use, I want to use a Romaine salad, I wouldn’t you know, iceberg I’m not so crazy about. Let me grab some of the nuts that I made earlier. I’ll take a little bit of my wonderful maple vinaigrette dressing. There it’s kind of course looking like I said. I’m going to go ahead and add little bit of feta. I’ll tell you what else goes well with this is a goat cheese. Also you might have tried gorgonzola. Gorgonzola’s nice too. Okay. And to finish it off, I’m going to do some craisins, dried cranberries. That is the greatest salad in the history of mankind.