Heather Christo

Even people who think they don't like beets will fall in love with this vibrant pesto.

I grew up with a mother that was very ahead of her time. In the early ’80s she had turned half of our back yard into an organic vegetable garden that almost completely sustained us during the warm months of the year. With four children running around, she had lot of help harvesting. I think that my love of gardening (and vegetables) stemmed from that childhood garden. In particular I remember the snap peas, strawberries, and zucchini.

Last year I spent a glorious week in Hawaii with my family, complete with a rather deluxe breakfast buffet. My husband was totally in heaven, but I typically find your average breakfast buffet a bit of a minefield. Given our allergies, I have to gently guide my daughters and myself past the sticky buns (gah!) and the bagel bar (sigh … ) as well as the line for the fluffy custom-made omelets.

When I was growing up, my mother had a well-used recipe box. Do you remember those? The little boxes overflowing with hand-written recipes on index cards and pages torn from magazines folded into quarters. The best of those were the family recipes that were handed down from my Grandma Grace and great-aunts: family cookie recipes, fluffy biscuits, and pecan sticky buns.

I knew I had to include this endive-avocado salad as part of a Mother’s Day brunch, as it is my own mother’s favorite salad (hi, Mom!). I tell people often — on my blog, in my book — that I have a long and complicated relationship with salad. My mother insisted on it every single night (no matter what) growing up. That meant that ages 4 to 12 I came up with many, many creative ways to dispose of it that did not include consumption.