Roasted Beet Salad with Orange Balsamic Vinaigrette

One of these days I swear I’ll stop posting on beets or zucchini. We still have a few beet plants growing but for the most part, we ripped them all out. I roasted a bunch of them on Sunday. No pickling this time because I’m lazy….and honestly, roasted beets are pretty good!

I haven’t been eating super healthy these days, so I thought I’d use these in a simple salad for dinner one night. I found a great recipe on AllRecipes.com. I made a couple changes but followed it pretty closely for the most part. Here’s the recipe I used:

Roasted Beet Salad with Orange Balsamic Vinaigrette

• 3-4 roasted beets
• a little over a 1/3 cup chopped walnuts
• 3 tbsp of maple syrup
• 1 package of mixed greens
• 1 cup of orange juice
• 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 2 ounces of feta cheese

The hardest part of this whole salad was roasting and peeling the beets. You could definitely just use canned beets if you don’t have (or don’t want to deal with) fresh ones. Once the beets were good to go, I candied the walnuts.

I’ve only candied walnuts once before but I made them using sugar. This time around, I used maple syrup. I just cooked them on the stove for about ten minutes (no oil or anything just the nuts) then added the maple syrup. Once the maple syrup was added, I just stirred continuously for a few minutes then took them off the burner. So easy (and delicious).

Next, I made the dressing. Just combine the orange juice, vinegar, and olive oil and there you have it! The original recipe uses orange juice concentrate (about 1/2 cup) so I just kept adding OJ to the mix and tasting it until I thought it tasted good. I used about 1 cup.

This was so easy and tasted great! The dressing was perfect with it and I couldn’t get enough of those candied walnuts! Check out the original recipe here if you’re curious what I changed around (just a couple things).

 

Are you a fan of beets?