French Fridays with Dorie: Endives, Apples and Grapes

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This autumn side dish ranks right up there with the best French Fridays with Dorie recipes thus far in cooking our way through Around My French Table. It was one I debated about even bothering with tonight, but the three gorgeous ingredients, and its uniqueness, simplicity, and rustic look won me over. I prepared it as a side dish (it could also be a first course), paired with a pan-roasted chicken breast, and I polished off the entire plate, right down to the last grape. Well, Trapper did help with a few bites of chicken and apple. 

endives, apples and grapes

I used small Fuji apples and substituted red grapes instead of green and thyme in place of rosemary. I halved one apple and quartered the other. The fruits and endive are cooked slowly in salted butter, and turned once halfway through, until they are soft and caramelized. The endive tastes amazing after it cooks and retains just a hint of bitterness. The apples and grapes are sweet and soft, but not mushy. I really encourage you to try this with roasted chicken or duck.

Gorgeous colors

Dorie features the recipe on her blog, here, as a Thanksgiving side dish. She offers another variation, called Thanksgiving Squash and Apples, with wedges of pumpkin or squash, chestnuts, apple, grapes, and sage, drizzled warm maple syrup and topped with toasted pecans. I may try that version sometime, but I'm definitely adding tonight's version to my fall and winter specialties and I will never look at endive the same way again. 
If you've never put cooked endive at the top of your favorites list,or if you've never even cooked endive,it's probably because you didn't have this recipe to turn to.         -Dorie Greenspan

Thursday night never tasted so good!

French Fridays with Dorie is an online cooking group, dedicated to Dorie Greenspan‘s Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours. As members of the group, we have purchased the cookbook and cook along as much as we can. There is a new recipe each week, and we post about that recipe on Friday. We are asked to refrain from posting the actual recipes on our blog. The book is filled with stunning photography, and personal stories about each recipe, which makes it that much more intriguing. I highly recommend adding it to your cookbook collection if you haven't already!