Bonus Recipe: Winter Rainbow Salad

Juicy, crunchy, sweet & slightly bitter; a perfect winter salad!

Hello Friends!

This colorful winter salad will brighten up even the coldest, greyest day with its gorgeous jewel tones, bright citrus flavor and array of flavors and crunchy, juicy textures. It’s a gorgeous salad, one that will prompt “oohs” and “ahhs” when you place it on the table at a holiday get-together. It’s also the perfect re-set salad between rich, heavy holiday meals. When your body needs a break from cookies and cheese and brisket, this winter rainbow salad is healthy and light and still really enjoyable to eat.

This is mostly a fruit salad, with strands of kale or chard tossed in for heartiness and balancing bitter flavor. It’s dressed with a generous squeeze of orange juice, which gives the salad bright, sweet flavor and is surprisingly popular with kids. I’d never thought of dressing salad with fresh squeezed juice until Josie came home from school one day and told me about the amazing salad she’d eaten at school that day.

One of the many nice things about the elementary school that Josie attends (and that I now work at) is the school garden. A small group of dedicated parents volunteer their time planting, weeding and nurturing the plot. Kids get to pop in for occasional garden classes to hunt for bugs, snuggle the chickens and sample the wide array of fruits and vegetables the garden produces. This winter, they’ve been making rainbow salad in garden class which is where I got this “recipe”.

I put “recipe” in quotes, because this is more like a list of ingredients that you toss into a bowl than a strict recipe. I provide exact measurements below, but you don’t have to follow them precisely. This salad is really about finding the right balance of ingredients that taste good to you. Keep in mind that this salad is made by little kids at school, and you should make it with the same loose, fun approach that they have.

Also, the kids eat this salad with their fingers, picking out pomegranate seeds and berries and crunchy apples pieces, which I think is one of the reasons they like the salad so much. I’ll let you decide what you’ll allow at your dinner table!