Our lunches are usually a salad or soup (depending on the weather!), but my salads are rarely replicated in terms of what they contain or what I serve alongside them.  I have heard people refer to salads as “boring”, but they’ve clearly not eaten one of mine!

We are off for the weekend, so my challenge is using up lots of bits and pieces from the fridge.  Usually I add things like celery, red pepper, radish, beetroot, red onion, tomatoes, cucumber, apple… but examining the contents of my salad drawer today I realised I was going to have to be inventive.

I was limited to using what I found laying on my half empty fridge shelves – half an apple, a tiny scrap of celery, lettuce and some sprouted seeds…. but also a few gems left from meals earlier in the week – half a buffalo mozzarella, a blood orange, a single slice of Torchon ham and a couple of Lidl stuffed vine leaves with dill and mint.

Mozzarella definitely lacks flavour, and we had a tiny portion each (30g) so I decided to zing it up using the chopped blood orange, a few chopped pecans and walnuts and some balsamic glaze.  It’s amazing what these few ingredients did for the Mozzarella and for the salad as a whole!  A 20g portion of  walnuts and pecans provided a lot of extra flavour and crunch for just 140 calories and the orange balanced the balsamic glaze beautifully.

Total of 351 calories for this plate of flavour, colour and crunch!