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Fresh Food Wednesday: Cranberry Spinach Salad Recipe

June 4, 2014 by Jeanne

Photo by Maena. Used under Morguefile.com license.

Cranberry Spinach Salad Recipe

My husband teases me that I’m a dollar store junkie, and it’s true. Once I discovered that the local dollar store had a freezer section and a grocery shelf, well, I was smitten. What’s not to love about a bag of frozen peaches or blueberries (no sugar added!) for $1? Or sea salt, with grinder, for $1?

Sometimes I catch a shipment just right and can stock up on a few healthy items like these. At other times, the store seems to lie in wait, tempting me with Russells Stovers chocolates, Hershey’s and all sorts of junk foods that I now avoid.

Last weekend, I caught a sale on dried cranberries. Cranberries! Yum! I bought a bag, brought it home, looked at my garden and thought, “Spinach salad with cranberries. Yes. Why not?”

And it was FANTASTIC.

I grow spinach in the garden just for the tender leaves to use in salads. I don’t grow a lot – I’ve found that growing spinach to freeze is too labor-intensive, and takes up too much room. But adding a few rows of spinach for salad greens is easy and enables me to diversify my salads inexpensively. The seeds were available for 25 cents at Wal-Mart this spring, and I planted two rows which have yielded innumerable salads. How can you put a price tag on organic spinach like this? Boxes of baby spinach leaves in the organic section of the produce aisle typically cost $1.99 – $3.99, depending on the season. I think I eat that much in a day when I make a salad like this one.


This salad was deceptively simple, deliciously tasty, and a wonderful low-calorie lunch. The feta cheese is optional. I need protein with my salads to feel full and alert in the afternoon, but vegans can easily add walnuts to the salad for their protein and voila – done.

Fresh Food Wednesday: Cranberry Spinach Salad

Ingredients

  • Two cups of rinsed baby spinach leaves
  • One slice of sweet onion, such as a Vidalia onion
  • One tablespoon of dried organic, no sugar added cranberries
  • One tablespoon of walnuts or low fat feta cheese
  • One tablespoon of balsamic vinegar
  • Two teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
Rinse and shred the spinach leaves, placing them in a large bowl. Layer onion on top and sprinkle with dried cranberries and walnuts or feta. Drizzle with balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Serve and enjoy.

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Jeanne
Jeanne

Jeanne Grunert is a certified Virginia Master Gardener and the author of several gardening books. Her garden articles, photographs, and interviews have been featured in The Herb Companion, Virginia Gardener, and Cultivate, the magazine of the National Farm Bureau. She is the founder of The Christian Herbalists group and a popular local lecturer on culinary herbs and herbs for health, raised bed gardening, and horticulture therapy.

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Comments

  1. Gina @ MoneywiseMoms

    June 4, 2014 at

    Yum! This is a salad my mom made for me a few times when I visited her, and it’s so simple but has complex flavors. Love it!

  2. Jo

    June 5, 2014 at

    Sounds good. I had never eaten spinach as a salad til I came to Canada.

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