Spring Spinach Salad

This is a recipe for a beautiful and very colorful Spring Spinach Salad inspired by my friend Shoba’s mixed greens with strawberries idea. It is simple to prepare yet showy and perfect for a spring potluck and upcoming Mother’s Day. The star of this salad is the edible flowers.

Spring occasions to make spring spinach salad:

Persian new year | Nooroz/Nowruz
Mother’s Day
Easter

I’ve made this salad many times since the inspirational lunch at Shobas. Each time I’ve brought this fancy salad to a gathering it has gotten rave reviews. Most recently I brought it along to our Easter brunch at my sister-in-law’s house. If you can find purple edible flowers the color really pops with the red of the strawberries – so pretty!!

: Mixed salad with strawberries, raspberries, beets, goat cheese, and nuts

: edible flowers from Whole Foods

: Mixed salad garnished with purple flowers

Edible Flowers are fun to add to salads to eat and to garnish. Please be careful with ingesting flowers if you are not used to eating them, especially if you have severe pollen allergies! Start slow. There are certain kinds of flowers that are edible and others that are not. Safest to either grow your own or pick them up from the fresh herb section in the farmer’s market or grocery. Steer clear of picking flowers to use in your salads – they may be sprayed with pesticides and they may not be the edible type!

Easter Sunday brunch with family

This salad is lovely with baby spinach and also mixed greens. I love butter lettuce – there are red varieties of butter lettuce that would look very nice in this mix. I sometimes add beets. If you like nuts and are lucky enough not to have nut allergies in the house, add some toasted, sliced almonds. For the cheese, feta has slightly less fat but goat cheese is a bit tastier here.

Trim the stems for a light baby spinach salad

Optional berries and fruit for color:

strawberries
raspberries
pomegranate arils
dried cherries or cranberries

Bob did an impromptu tutorial on how to open a pomegranate for me this morning. I could hardly believe how easy it was to film him, put it on Snapchat and Youtube, and be able to share the ‘how-to’ with you all. I just love the DIY share experience. To learn a cool technique on how to easily get pomegranate arils (the little seeded fruit) out from the peel underwater, click on the arrow below: