Summery Baby Spinach and Strawberry Salad with Vinaigrette
This light and fruity summery spinach and strawberry salad will delight your palate!
The first time I served a salad that included both fruit and vegetables, my mother thought I had mixed up two recipes and mistakenly added dessert ingredients to the salad that I was serving alongside savory chicken and kugel. “Ma, trust the process,” I told her. She was skeptical, but after tasting it she loved it so much that every time she comes to me for Shabbos, I am happy to make a delicious fruit-and-vegetable salad for her! If you think about it, it doesn’t really make sense — fruit should stick with fruit and vegetables with vegetables. Especially for me, as I don’t like mixing flavor profiles: I don’t like salted caramel; I don’t like sweet and spicy. But there’s something about the combination of lettuce, cucumber and strawberry that just works so well.
What I love about making salads is that it’s not like baking, where each component and its amount is scientifically necessary and if you forget or decide to skip something, you may ruin it. You can have so much fun with salads — add what you want, leave out what you want… I love to add avocado to all my salads, but I have a niece who hates avocado, so when she’s around I skip it. One of my kids doesn’t like nuts, so I don’t put them in a salad if she’s going to be eating it. My girls love cucumbers, so I often double up on them — and even if a recipe doesn’t actually call for cucumber, I’ll add it!
That being said, this particular salad calls for baby spinach leaves. I know they are hard to come by, expensive and not easy to wash yourself, but you can absolutely sub with any leafy green. Also, if you don’t use fresh strawberries, you can easily swap for pomegranate seeds or mango in the salad and frozen strawberries in the dressing.
If I am serving this spinach and strawberry salad at a milchig meal (this is actually the best salad for a dairy Shavuos meal!), I will add some crumbled feta. If I am serving it at a fleishig meal, I will keep it pareve, or be daring and add some slices of grilled chicken. Believe it or not, it goes really well.
When prepping the salad, if I’m not serving it right away, I like to keep the cut-up components in separate Ziploc bags so it takes seconds to assemble when I’m ready. The only thing I don’t cut in advance is the spinach leaves. I used to keep them whole (because they look so pretty that way!), but I found them to be too large and hard to eat. So I started chopping them into smaller pieces, but they stay fresher if cut right before serving.
I like to serve this spinach and strawberry salad on a big platter with a rim rather than a deep salad bowl. It just looks so much prettier that way! You can certainly do it whichever way works best for you.
To be honest, when it comes to salad dressing, 99.9% of the time I use my five-ingredient everyday salad dressing, no matter how fancy the salad or what’s in it. I just love a good caesar-style dressing. I’m that nerd who orders a fancy salad at a restaurant and then asks them to swap the classy vinaigrette for caesar dressing. But I pushed myself to make a new dressing for this salad and am I happy I did! The creaminess of the blended strawberries…the tang of the white wine vinegar…just wow! I was licking the spoon like it was a smoothie!
The dressing calls for white wine vinegar. This is different from regular white vinegar. They sell it in most grocery stores and it adds a delicious tang to the dressing. If you can’t find it, you can swap for regular vinegar, balsamic vinegar, red wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar.
I made this dressing using my Ninja blender, which I bought a while ago on a Cyber Monday deal. My girls love smoothies and recently I started using it more often for dressings. It’s such a pleasure to use and the best hack for cleaning it is to add some soap and a bit of warm water and crank it up for a few seconds — it will do the deep cleaning for you!
Baby Spinach and Strawberry Salad with Vinaigrette
Ingredients
Dressing:
- 4 large strawberries*
- ⅓ cup oil (I use avocado oil)
- 2 Tbsp honey
- 2 Tbsp white wine vinegar
Salad:
- 1 package baby spinach leaves
- 2 cups purple cabbage
- 4 Persian cucumbers, sliced
- 9 strawberries,* sliced
- Handful pecans, broken into pieces
Instructions
- For the dressing, place all ingredients in a blender. Blend until smooth and creamy.
- To assemble the salad, place vegetables, fruit and nuts in a bowl or on a large platter. Drizzle with dressing and toss gently before serving.
Notes
Recipe by Faigy Murray | https://mykitchenmystudio.com/summery-spinach-and-strawberry-salad/
