Orange Date Spinach Salad

For our first attempt at recipe sharing want to start slow and simple. This salad I came up with when I was, frankly, bored of the usual dinner salad of lettuce, cucumber, raddish, bell pepper, and tomato.  Salads are dynamic, flexible, and sometimes don't involve lettuce at all.  Just look at these Jell-O salad recipes, or flip through any church members cookbook of the last 10 years or more.  My husband once piled no less than 4 kinds of meat onto one plate and declared it a salad.  But, I digress.  This is fairly light, although robust in textures, and is one of my favorites for pairing with just about any meal.

Allergen Notes: Tree nuts
Lifestyle: Vegan, Vegetarian, Clean Eating, Gluten Free

Orange Date Spinach Salad
1 1/2 c. baby spinach
20 dried dates, sliced
1/2 red onion sliced thinly
1 10.75oz can mandarin orange segments
1/2 c. pecan halves
4 TBSP roasted walnut oil

Layer spinach, dates, onion, oranges, and pecans.  Drizzle with walnut oil. 

Makes 4 salads. 
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 0 minutes
Plating time: <10 minutes

We'll collect our ingredients and get them into the assembly line before we put everything together.   I like to assemble my salads on their individual plates to maximize presentation potential.  And, because it niggles my righteous sense of meal time pageantry to have all the pretty parts of the salad end up on the bottom of the salad bowl. 

Every salad needs a base and most bases are green in nature.  This salad is no different.  Fresh spinach is a marvelous, inexpensive thing. Baby spinach even more so, because it comes in those marvelous little five ounce plastic boxes that say "Triple washed and ready to use!" on them.  The spinach is edible and the boxes are recyclable! It's a win-win no matter which way you look at it.  

One small handful of spinach leaves per salad should do it, say approximately 3/4 cup.  

Next, find yourself some nice dried (but not desiccated into rigor motoris), unsweetened dates.  Only recently have I come to appreciate the date and its usefulness in cooking, snacking, and using as dummy cockroach bodies.  

About 4-5 dates or fewer per salad is all you need.  Slice them into sections like you would slice a green olive to show the red pimento center.  

Next, we want some mandarin oranges.  We are looking for are the canned variety, more specifically those canned without using high fructose corn syrup, sorbitol, or other additional sweeteners.  Or, canned in syrup.     Fruit packs a fructose punch as it is without throwing in added glucose and other sugar sources.  We want to have a salad, not a blood insulin spike.

A 10 ounce can of mandarin oranges packed in mandarin orange juice is going to have about 12 g of sugar per serving, and the amount we are using per salad is going to give you <1 gram.  Even still, it's best to stay aware of what you're buying.  Native Forest sells a very good mandarin orange.  

Red onions! What, you say? Red onions?  Yes.  Red onions.  We want thin thin slices, since we want them for texture and flavor and not for ruining any make out sessions you may have planned later after dinner.  

Now go find yourself some fresh pecans.  Raw or roasted makes no matter, but what does matter is that they are NOT salted.  Remember: NO SALT.  

I buy pecan halves and then do a rough chop, although sometimes I leave the halves un-accosted.  If you hate pecans or have an allergy, you could use walnuts or even macadamia nuts.  I didn't really like the taste of almonds in this salad, personally. 

The salad dressing is nothing more than a very light drizzling of roasted walnut oil.   This is my favorite brand and I've found it at most major grocery stores as well as Whole Foods, Sunflower Market, and Vitamin Cottage (a.k.a., Natural Grocers).  

The order of events should unfurl as follows:

Spinach on the bottom.  Date pieces sprinkled artistically on top of the spinach followed by 2-3 thin red onion rings (or 4-6 thin red onion ring halves).  2-3 ounces of mandarin orange segments next.  Pecans sprinkled on top.  Drizzle with 1 TBSP (or more depending on how much you want) of walnut oil.  At this point, you can start cramming it in your cake hole.