Good wintery greens: Warm Spinach, Mushroom and Goat Cheese Salad

It’s not the easiest task finding a good “wintery” salad, one that goes well with the richer dishes and red wine of cold weather as opposed to the hamburgers and margaritas of summer.
   I’ve found one that I really like, though – Warm Spinach, Mushroom and Goat Cheese Salad (click for the recipe) from Bon Appetit magazine. It’s rich-dish and red-wine ready.
   When goat cheese is featured in a salad, it often steals the spotlight because of its soft, creamy texture and pleasing taste.
   But that’s not the case here – goat cheese just blends in nicely with the rest of the ingredients.
   My husband and I tinkered with the recipe just a bit.
   It calls for six bacon slices, chopped, to be cooked in a skillet, removed, set aside, and the drippings to be used for cooking the rest of the ingredients.
   The bacon is sadly never heard from again in the recipe, and my husband and I didn’t think that was fair. We sprinkled the bacon on top of our salad servings, and found it was a perfect addition.
   Also, the recipe calls for half of a medium-size red onion cut into paper-thin slices. My husband and I did this, but ended up taking out the red onion pieces out of our salad servings anyway – we’re really not fans of it raw (we love it cooked, though!)
   I think you can easily skip the red onion and still get delicious results.
   After the bacon is cooked and removed from the skillet, a large red bell pepper, chopped, is added to the drippings and cooked. The mushrooms follow suit.
   The bell pepper, mushrooms, spinach and red onion (skip it if you want!) are tossed together in a large bowl.
   Olive oil, white wine vinegar and sugar are added to the now-empty skillet and are brought to a boil. The resulting dressing is poured over the salad ingredients, enough to coat them well (you may not use all of the dressing.)
   The salad is put onto plates, and sprinkled with goat cheese.

More great salads and sides

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