Winter salad with cucumber, avo & blue cheese

This winter salad with cucumber, avo, blue cheese and micro beet leaves is packed with flavour and texture – fresh cucumber, silky avo, salty blue cheese and earthy baby beetroot leaves.

Salads in general are hardly the most sought-after meal in the middle of winter and when we had a storm like last night raging on outside. I prefer to get my green quotient through roasted vegetables, or in warm comforting soups.

However, after what feels like over a  month of solid soup eating, I was craving the texture and the freshness of raw vegetables. With avocados in full season and spilling out of my fruit bowl, I wanted to use them of course.

I love the flavour combination of cucumber and blue cheese. An avo and blue cheese combo always rocks, and I just happened to have a pack of beautiful micro crimson leaves from Woolies. Red chard, beetroot and mustard. The exquisite flavour of beetroot transfers so strongly through these tiny shoots.

There was quite a lot of flavour going on with this salad – so in lieu of a dressing, I simply drizzled olive oil and sprinkled salt and black pepper.

To make this salad, shave ribbons of cucumber from the length of an English cucumber. Crumble blue cheese over slices of avo and sprinkle over the micro leaves.

I’m a big fan of beetroot so if I didn’t have these leaves, I would have added chopped-up cooled roasted beetroot.

Here’s my salad with pickled beetroot:

pickled beetroot salad with goats cheese – orange & maple vinaigrette