Super Healthy Sweet Spinach Salad

If I could only buy five items at the grocery store to feed my family off of for a week, fresh baby spinach would be on the list. I can do about a million things with this stuff, and it is so healthy for you. I especially like it's high calcium content since I am dairy free these days due to baby Ari's milk protein allergy. I splurged a little on G baby's birthday weekend at my Dad's house because he made homemade ice cream, and sure enough...Ari has a slight rash and a little bit of blood in her stool again. The good news is now I have confirmation that dairy is definitely the culprit, the bad news is now I feel like a super-asshole for giving her a rash!

Anyways, the good news about this salad is that it's very versatile if you have to substitute some ingredients.
More on that later though.

Ingredients:

1/2 bag baby spinach (can use regular)

1 avocado

1 vidalia onion

5-8 strawberries

1 small package walnuts (or pecans or pine nuts)

Raspberry Walnut Vinaigrette (or other sweet vinaigrette dressing)

You can pretty much use any nuts for this recipe, I actually feel that pecans would be even better, but I went for walnuts because they are lower in both price and fat content. You can also omit the avocado if you don't like them or just want to save money, but they do add a lot of nutrition to this salad, so I definitely recommend you put one in there!

 First, saute the onions and nuts until the onions are translucent and start to caramelize. I sauteed mine in margarine.

Chop up your strawberries and avocados into bite-size pieces.

       Pile it all together and top with some vinaigrette dressing! I went light on the dressing because between the strawberries and caramelized onions, there's already a lot of flavor to this salad.
The overall taste of this salad is sweet and nutty, you don't even realize how much spinach you are eating!
Enjoy!

xoxo,

L