Harvest Salad

Harvest Salad – A spinach salad with cranberries and blue cheese is served with a raspberry vinaigrette.

I guess it’s time for something a little healthier….I have so many recipes that I need to blog about. The desserts are more exciting to me, but I do want to share all of my cooking adventures.

I have been saving and printing recipes for years now. In fact, a few months back, I decided to get my recipes a little more organized, so I started with all of the recipes that were printed off of websites or emails that I have collected over the years. They are now all organized in binders – 3 of them that are 2 to 3 inches thick each. Ummm, I think I may get carried away when I collect recipes – even if I were to make one of those recipes a day for the rest of my life, I don’t know if I would get through all of them! (Add that to the cookbooks, the 438 recipes I have bookmarked on my del.icio.us page, and the other grocery bag full of recipes cut out of magazines and from the back of packages…you get my point!)

I was craving a salad one day, so I randomly picked one of my recipes from the “salad” section of my printed recipes. This is the one I chose. I rarely think you can go wrong with a salad. Filled with tons of veggies, and I usually like to add some sort of protein, I can usually eat a large bowl and not feel guilty about it. This was a great salad, although I would make a couple of changes the next time around.

The salad calls for baby spinach, and I did a mixture of baby spinach and baby greens. I also substituted pecans for walnuts. I almost forgot the blue cheese, but remembered right as I started eating and added it to the salad. (I had already taken the picture, so no cheese in the picture!) I also added some chicken. I had an avocado, but I wished afterwards that I wouldn’t have used it, mainly because it wasn’t quite ripe enough yet, and didn’t have much flavor to it. The dressing is a simple raspberry vinaigrette. It calls for walnut oil, and since I didn’t have any walnut oil, I substituted something else, but I can’t remember what it was – probably olive oil. The dressing wasn’t anything spectacular, but it complimented the salad nicely.

A successful dinner – I cleared my plate!!

Harvest Salad

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Author: Deborah Harroun

Prep Time: 15 minutes minutes

Cook Time: 5 minutes minutes

Total Time: 25 minutes minutes

Servings: 2 servings, or 4 servings as a side salad

Course: Salad

Cuisine: American

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A spinach salad with cranberries and blue cheese is served with a raspberry vinaigrette.

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Ingredients

Dressing

• ▢ 2 tablespoons raspberry jam
• ▢ 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
• ▢ 1/3 cup oil walnut, olive or vegetable works
• ▢ salt and pepper to taste

Salad

• ▢ 1/2 cup chopped pecans
• ▢ 2 cups spinach torn into bite sized pieces
• ▢ 2 cups baby greens
• ▢ 1 cup cooked chicken cut into bite sized pieces
• ▢ 1/2 cup dried cranberries
• ▢ 1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese
• ▢ 2 tomatoes chopped
• ▢ 1 avocado peeled, pitted and sliced
• ▢ 1/2 red onion thinly sliced

Instructions

Make the dressing:

• In a small bowl, whisk together the jam and vinegar. Slowly whisk in the oil until combined. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Make the salad:

• Preheat the oven to 375F. Arrange the pecans in a single layer on a baking sheet and toast until they start to brown, about 5 minutes.
• In a large bowl, toss together the pecans, spinach, greens, chicken, cranberries, blue cheese, tomatoes, avocado and red onion. Serve with the dressing.

Recipe Notes:

adapted from allrecipes