Easy Caprese Salad With Spinach — Plus Salad Bar Saturday!

Welcome back to Sunday Scratchups (yes it is indeed Monday — time got away from me!), your weekly source for recipes from scratch around grocery sales and affordable ingredients. This week we saw some lovely seasonal sales on mozzarella. My garden tomatoes are still just barely starting to ripen, but tomatoes on the vine are also coming into their own on sale at the supermarket, making this a very affordable, fresh, and easy meal. The basil and spinach here are from my garden, so this recipe is also a great way to use up some of the fresh basil that’s going nuts this time of year

• Looking for dairy free Caprese salad? Find that sister recipe here.

Easy Caprese Salad with spinach can be another rare meatless meal in itself, which is often hard to do with low carb MashupDad in the house. We actually enjoyed our Caprese Salad this week, though, as part of our Salad Bar Saturday spread — which also gave us leftovers. (Bonus!)

Have you tried Salad Bar Saturday, by the way? It’s a great way to balance out Taco Tuesday, use up some of the leftovers from the week, and get some veggies into the kids by giving them choices! Just chop up a bunch of veggies and put out any other salad toppings you can find in the house, along with some fruit (we had watermelon and cherries with ours).

On our own “salad bar” here today I put out both the regular and dairy free Caprese salads, and also have everything from cherry tomatoes to croutons to mushrooms to sweet peppers to cucumbers to broccoli to cauliflower to baby carrots to lunch meat to olives to jalapeños to dried cranberries to slivered almonds to hummus to cheese to pesto to… and just tossed a $.99 bag of garden salad from ALDI with some more of that garden spinach to give it both crunch and vitamins.

But let’s get back to that Caprese salad recipe, since I digress…

Easy Caprese Salad with Spinach

Check out my Kosher salt in the nice blue canister I got from Goodwill! So much easier to measure out or grab a pinch than straight from the box.

Ingredients

8 oz mozzarella fresca
2 vine ripe tomatoes
2 oz fresh spinach
fresh basil leaves
1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
Kosher salt, to taste
Black pepper, to taste

Directions

Cover a large plate with fresh spinach leaves. Slice your mozzarella and tomatoes, then just start layering them across your plate on top of the spinach. Mozzarella slice, basil leaf, tomato slice, repeat until the entire plate is covered.

Drizzle your salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, then add Kosher salt and pepper to taste. I like to let mine chill in the refrigerator for an hour or so before serving, but you can also serve immediately for a prettier presentation.

That’s all you need for a beautiful fresh Caprese salad

So easy, right? And the spinach adds another layer of flavor, plus it helps balance out the basil if you find the whole leaves overwhelming.

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Easy Caprese Salad With Spinach -- Plus Salad Bar Saturday!

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Course Salad

chill 1 hour hour

Total Time 15 minutes minutes

Author Rachel Singer

Ingredients

• 8 oz mozzarella fresca
• 2 vine ripe tomatoes
• 2 oz fresh spinach
• fresh basil leaves
• 1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
• Kosher salt to taste
• Black pepper to taste

Instructions

• Cover a large plate with fresh spinach leaves.
• Slice your mozzarella and tomatoes, then just start layering them across your plate on top of the spinach. Mozzarella slice, basil leaf, tomato slice, repeat until the entire plate is covered.
• Drizzle your salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, then add Kosher salt and pepper to taste.
• I like to let mine chill in the refrigerator for an hour or so before serving, but you can also serve immediately for a prettier presentation.