Every time I make this salad people ask me for the recipe. I love to bring it to cookouts, potlucks, or any situatiuon where you are asked to bring a dish. It is seriously delicious.

While I am providing a recipe for the dressing, I usually just buy store bought poppyseed dressing and people still love it. This salad can be thrown together pretty quickly and like most salads all the work is in the chopping. To make the work of chopping easier I highly recommend these salad scissors or you can use any kitchen scissors. I love my salad scissors so much that I often wish I carried them in my purse for when I eat salads out at restaurants. Very few people cut up salad ingredients enough for my taste- specifically lettuce. I do not want a giant lettuce leaf in my salad. I want to be able to get a little bit of everything in most bites.

What is great about this salad is that the main ingredients, spinach and strawberries, are growing in the garden at the same time. I have dreamed of having fresh lettuce and tomatoes at the same time but in my decade plus of gardening I have never made that happen. By the time the tomatoes are ready, the lettuce has bolted. If you don’t have a garden, you should easily find these items at your local farmers market at the same time.

The recipe I’m giving you below is very flexible. In fact you will barely be able to call it a recipe. And when I make this salad, it’s a little different every time, often to utilize whatever I have or can easily buy. These are the basic components- leafy greens, berries, nuts, cheese, and poppyseed dressing. The way that we cook is often in this manner and one of the reasons we have a hard time giving people recipes. When we post about the food we are eating/making on our YouTube videos we always have people request a recipe. But most of the time there isn’t a recipe. For me to feel comfortable giving a recipe, I feel like it needs to be tested and have exact measurements, but we are not recipe developers or food bloggers. That takes a lot of time and resources!

For example we have this gluten free blueberry muffin cake that we’ve made a few times and people are always asking us for the recipe. Every single time we’ve made it, the end result is different. We’ve been playing around with different types of gluten free flours to get the recipe just right. The first time Savannah made it was the best, but it still wasn’t perfect, and we’ve never been able to recreate it or make it better. We also aren’t in a place to dedicate our lives to getting this blueberry muffin cake recipe tested & ready to offer the world. We just alter some things when we want/need to make it again. Anyway, I digress- but you get the point. We live in the world of flexible recipes. So if you need exact measurements, this recipe isn’t for you.

Strawberry Spinach Salad Recipe-ish

Ingredients:

Spinach (or any leafy green you like)
Strawberries (you can also add or substitute any other berries)
Pecans (walnuts, almonds, pepitas would do)
Goat Cheese or Feta Cheese
Shallots or Red Onion (this is optional and not something I include every time)

I know you want amounts but just think about any salad. It’s a lot of leafy greens and the toppings. There is usually a lot more greens than toppings, so you don’t want 1 cup of greens & 1 cup of strawberries. That being said, that would probably still be good. You really can’t mess up a salad, ya know? Follow your heart.

If you wanted to add protein you could add chicken to this and it would be lovely. Many times when I want to add a meat to a salad and don’t have any prepared, I will cut up deli meat.

“Poppyseed” Dressing Recipe

Ingredients:

1/4 cup white wine vinegar
1/4 cup sugar
1 small shallot
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon dijon mustard
1 T mayonnaise
1/4 cup olive oil or vegetable oil
splash of red wine vinegar ( add this to taste, I like vinegary dressings )

When I made this dressing I didn’t use poppyseeds 😂 so I don’t know what to call it. It’s the base of a poppyseed dressing without the seeds. Do with that what you will. This recipe is adapted from this one from The Kitchn which is why there are measurements at all. However I modified it quite a bit by using significantly less oil, changing out a few ingredients (ground mustard for dijon mustard), adding red wine vinegar, and omitting the poppyseeds altogether.

Please let me know in the comments if you find this recipe format obnoxious. That will not hurt my feelings. We could share many more of the things we cook in the kitchen if enough people were satisified with a loose recipe. Think of us like your grandma’s who cook with their hearts. I do promise we’ll never provide a baking recipe in this format. What a disaster!