Spinach Salad with Apples and Cashews

Although we are now in the Philippines, I have been busy pre-cooking and pre-photographing at home so that you can read a lot, look at tasty Food pictures and have lots of recipes for cooking during the Christmas holidays. As you might have read in my previous Chocolate-Cookie-post, I couldn’t post anything during our holiday because of the bad Internet connection. However, for this delicious winter salad recipe this doesn’t matter at all.

When it’s cold and rainy outside, we usually don’t get the idea of making a fresh, crispy salad because we are already feeling cold enough. Most of the time we want something warm and hearty, like the oven grilled aubergines that I posted here some weeks ago, or a nice warm soup. But even in winter, the consumption of fresh leafy greens should not be neglected. You can theoretically make the salad with blanched or steamed kale, it tastes just as delicious and the combination with the other ingredients makes also a great fit.

The dressing that comes with the salad is THE dressing! Once you know how to prepare it, you can conjure up a 100% delicious taste experience out of every, really every salad. I used to have no salad dressing at all and all my salads tasted in one word AWFUL. It became clear to me that sometimes for the taste it is not so important what’s IN the salad, but what DRESSING you pour over it. So I had to learn how to mix a decent dressing. The result of years of trying it out can be found here today:

Over time, you will also get to know other variants of it, e.g. refined with orange, blueberry or raspberry, depending on the season and the salad you need it for. I will soon write you a separate salad dressing post.

One last tip at the end, before I go back to the beach: What is incredibly tasty, but takes a few extra minutes of your time, is if you briefly sear the thinly sliced apples. Then they lose acidity and give off a wonderfully sweet, caramel aroma.

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