King of the Summer Salad

Hello there! Welcome to summer!
Almost. Almost welcome to summer!

Summer captured in 4 pictures (including my post-running face)

The weather is not always agreeing, if I would have written this blog post last week you probably would have declared me crazy. Even though it is not extremely sunny today, it is still hot, humid and sticky, which equals to a true Dutch summer if you ask me! Luckily enough there have been enough sunny days to have the amount of strawberries exponentially increase in the shops (for reasonable prices, locally grown).

So when I say strawberries, you say:
CREAM
CAKE
DESERT
and CHOCOLATE

but I say:
SALAD!

Say what? Say salad! In a month I'm going on a holiday to Tuscany (in Italy, obviously) and even though I'm moderately happy with my body when I'm clothed, I'm not too confident while wearing a bikini... Expecting me to diet is a very unrealistic thought. I like to run, so I try to do that a bit more often, and to be a bit more active overall, but I like food too much to be seriously cutting back on that department.

I really do think you can have it both ways though... it is all in choosing overall healthy ingredients that taste great and keep you fully nourished so you won't feel the need to snack throughout the day! That is what this salad will do for you. I've had the basic salad years earlier for the first time, but I stumbled across another version of it on the blog called gimmesomeoven, if you click the link it'll take you to the original recipe.

However, I found that the original recipe was not really a full meal... I had it for dinner with nothing on the side yesterday and I was so hungry the rest of the evening I actually stole some of my boyfriends food off of his plate *naughty*. I had so many of the ingredients left over today I thought I'd give it another try, but this time I added some bits and pieces that did make it a full evening meal. So here it goes, I hope you'll like it!

King of the Summer Salad

Goats cheese & bacon, Summer on a plate

Ingredients (for 1 serving):
50 grams of pasta like orecchiette
2 large handfuls of baby Spinach
3 large strawberries cut into little pieces
half an avocado cut into pieces
half a red union, thinly sliced
2 rashes of bacon
soft goats cheese
1 teaspoon oregano
a bit of honey
poppy seed dressing

Poppyseed dressing
Ingredients (for 1 serving):
1 tablespoon of lemon juice
1 teaspoon of honey
half a teaspoon of mustard
pepper & salt to taste
1 teaspoon of poppy-seeds

To start I turned on the oven, my oven does not really have settings... but I put it on medium heat. I took the bacon and cut the rashes in half. Then I put 1 teaspoon of goats cheese on each half of the rashes of bacon, added a drop of honey and sprinkled some oregano on top. Then I folded the bacon over the cheese until it was completely covered. I baked these parcels of love on a sheet of baking paper for about 15 minutes in the oven. The cheese will probably seep out a bit, but that honestly doesn't matter.

I boiled some water, added some salt and boiled the pasta. You might think that this amount of pasta is not enough, but don't forget you're adding a complete salad to this... it is only to bulk it up a bit! Once it is cooked (after 10 minutes or so) you rinse them under cold water.

I then assembled the salad, which really is the most difficult task of this recipe because you have to toss everything on a plate and make it look artistic. You then mix up the dressing, which possibly is even harder than the salad because you have to put all of the ingredients in a small bowl and mix it up... Add your dressing to the salad and put the goats cheese/bacon treats cut into little pieces on top!

The strawberries and poppy-seeds really need to be the heroes of this dish, so before you add the dressing make sure it is not to sour, and don't get tempted to add more bacon to this dish, you won't need it!

Give it a try and let me know what you think! You can leave me a comment below this article, or follow my facebook page, instagram or twitter, I'd love to hear what you think!

Lots of love,
Floor