The Summer Strawberry Salad

This is the magical strawberry salad. It is one of my all-time favorites, super easy to make, and very good for you!

You will need:
Mixed greens
Strawberries
Blackberries (optional)
Feta or Chevre cheese
Pecans or Walnuts (optional)

Vinegarette

You have a couple of choices here:
A) Go buy some strawberry vinegarette at the store! I have no clue how they make it but it is delicious.
B) Squeeze a little lemon juice into a bowl or, if you are a class-act like myself, dump it out of the giant plastic bottle of lemon juice you keep in your fridge. Put a teensy bit of olive oil, a teensy bit of white wine vinegar and a dash of pepper in there as well. You definitely want to go with about a 5:1 with the lemon juice and olive oil. Go easy on the vinegar, too.

OR you could try this recipe for Strawberry Vinegarette I just found on the interwebs!

http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/od/soupsandsalads/r/strawberryvinag.htm

I probably would abstain from the mustard, but that is only because I think mustard is gross. If you are disgusting and like mustard, then please, by all means...



Hokay, so...

1) Wash your spring mix. You don't know who picked it/threw it in the bag/what animal gave birth or pooped all over it. WASH IT. Make sure it is relatively dry, then put a bed of spring mix on every salad plate. If you are doing a large portion, put it in the communal salad trough.
2) Same with the strawberries and blackberries.
3) Crush up your nuts until they are sprinkle-worthy
4) Slice up your strawberries and put them on the salad first, then sprinkle blackberries on top of that.
5) LIGHTLY drizzle whatever dressing you have chosen. (Sidenote: that lemon-pepper vinegarette "recipe" at the beginning is my standby for just about everything salad related).
6) crumble feta over salad (or just put a little dab of chevre in the middle of the salad. Just a little. That stuff is expensive. Probably because it is FROOOOOOOOONCH)
7) Lightly dust crushed up nuts of your choice over salad and enjoy.

I usually don't add protein to this dish, but I can safely say that if you put a couple chicken breasts in a pan or on the grill and drizzle the chicken with honey, it complements the salad really nicely.