12 February 2015
Welcome friends. I am usually baking cookies or cupcakes at this time of year. We have a Valentine's Day bake sale at the office and donate the proceeds to charity. This year I decided to take a break. I baked over 200 cookies around the holidays, and there was a lot of quality monitoring involved. When the New Year rolled around, I treated it like a blank slate and made several resolutions to make improvements. But time and bad habits have a way of unravelling my good intentions.
So here we are in February. I know it is early in the year, but I can already see that I am not tracking well against my resolutions. I am not ready to just toss them aside, but I've come to the conclusion that some of them were not realistic. I am rereading my resolutions and making adjustments and I hope that reading this inspires you to do the same. Doing something is better than doing nothing, right?
One of my resolutions was to feel better. I decided that one way to achieve this was to eat more healthy foods. I am writing this post to share my winter spinach salad recipe. I have been making this for a few months, and I now keep the ingredients on hand so that I can assemble the salad often. There is some prep work involved with roasting the sweet potatoes. I treat them like croutons in this salad (although I've never bothered to make croutons with bread).
I like greens with flavor, and I don't like to coat my greens with salad dressing. I like to drizzle a teaspoon or two over the top. The balsamic recipe makes about 2 tablespoons, but you can easily double it if you need more.
Winter Spinach Salad
30 min. prep time | 50 min. bake time | cool time for the sweet potatoes
Ingredients
serves 4
- for the potatoes
- 2 large or 3 medium sweet potatoes
- 1 Tbl olive oil
- 1/4 tsp sea salt
- fresh cracked pepper
- 1/2 cup frozen, shelled, edamame
- 6 cups fresh spinach
- 1/4 cup dried cranberries
- 2 Tbl pumpkin seeds
- for the dressing
- 1 1/2 Tbl olive oil
- 1 tsp balsamic vinegar
- 1/4 tsp tamari (reduced sodium)
- fresh cracked pepper
- 1/2 tsp dijon mustard
- 1/2 tsp honey
Directions
preheat the oven to 375° F.
peal the sweet potatoes and cut them into cubes that are about the size of half-inch croutons. Place the cubes on a baking sheet and sprinkle 1/4 tsp salt, fresh cracked pepper and 1 Tbl olive oil over the top. Use your hands to mix everything. Spread out the sweet potatoes on the baking sheet.
bake the sweet potatoes for 50 minutes and allow them to cool completely. Once they have cooled, place them in an air-tight container and refrigerate them.
place about 1½ cups of fresh spinach into 4 bowls. Add ¼ cup of the cooled sweet potato cubes to each bowl.
place the edamame beans in a small bowl and cover with cold water. Allow the beans to thaw for 15 minutes.
combine the olive oil, balsamic, tamari, and a little fresh cracked pepper in a small bowl and whisk a few times. Add the mustard and honey to the bowl. Whisk until the ingredients are combined and the dressing has thickened a little, this should take a minute or two. Set aside.
drain the thawed beans and evenly distribute them among the bowls. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of dried cranberries into each bowl. Top each salad with ½ tablespoon of pumpkin seeds.
drizzle about 2 teaspoons of the balsamic dressing over the top of each salad, or place the salad dressing in a small container and serve. You can double the dressing recipe if you need more.