Orange-Cranberry Spinach Salad

I’ve been eating a lot of spinach salads lately - not just for the taste, but also for the iron. Needless to say, I’ve been trying to come up with lots of different tasty spinach salad recipes. I came up with a wonderful spinach salad recipe tonight for dinner! It was actually a spinach cranberry salad, as I used dried cranberries in the recipe. Since I also used mandarin oranges, I could just as easily call it spinach salad with mandarin oranges. This latest recipe for spinach salad is really awesome, and I’ll certainly be making it again and again. It’s quick and easy to make, and I love the variety of textures in this spinach salad. It’s crunchy, chewy, and creamy, all at the same time. The flavors are varied, too, and they complement each other nicely. My spinach salad recipe provides your taste buds with sweet, sour, tangy, and earthy. What more could you ask of a recipe for spinach salad? I think my favorite part of the salad was the spinach salad dressing that I concocted. I turned bottled Italian dressing into orange salad dressing, which went great with the other flavors represented. I used low-fat Italian dressing in my orange dressing, but you might prefer using regular or fat-free Italian dressing. I used pecans on my spinach salad, but walnuts would be yummy, too.

What you’ll need:

½ cup bottled Italian dressing

Juice of one orange

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

1 tablespoon sugar or Splenda

¼ cup dried cranberries

5-ounce container fresh baby spinach

Small can mandarin oranges, drained

Broken pecans

Crumbled blue cheese

Directions: Pour Italian dressing into a large cup or small bowl and add orange juice, balsamic vinegar, and sugar or Splenda. Add the dried cranberries and stir. Allow dried cranberries to soak in dressing for about ten minutes.

While dressing is resting, arrange spinach leaves on a large plate or platter. Top with mandarin orange segments, broken pecans, and crumbled blue cheese.

Spoon orange salad dressing over spinach salad, making sure to evenly distribute the dried cranberries.

To make this spinach salad recipe more hearty, you might want to add bacon bits, diced chicken, boiled shrimp, or chunks of crabmeat. In all honesty, I added a can of albacore tuna to mine tonight. I’ve been eating a lot of tuna, and I wasn’t sure how it would go with the spinach salad, but it was actually quite tasty!