Spinach Salad, Me Maties

Okay, so I'm not Popeye or even Olive Oyl, but I did use olive oil in the dressing for today's bare bones spinach salad. I substituted what I had on hand (bamboo shoots) and this tangy-sweet dressing coupled with the fresh spinach to make a surprisingly satisfying snack--both in taste and in fill factor. Click image to see a closeup.

The dressing came from a recipe called "Heart of Palm Salad" which (you guessed it) features Hearts of Palm. It calls for vinegar, sugar and ketchup which you can imagine makes for a sweet, syrupy dressing--it is!--but I altered it a bit, so I could use my Balsemic vinegar (naturally sweet) and pretty much just used equal amounts of the other stuff, with just a dash of salt and garlic rather than teaspoons full, called for in the recipe. The dressing was going to have to be the "star" of this salad. As you can see, it's really more spinach and something else drenched in dressing. Yeah, not a low-calorie snack ;-) But yummy and healthy!

Since Hearts of Palm are available here only in cans and very expensive at that, I opted for the cheapo bamboo shoots I had on hand. I also had no fresh tomatoes (cherry or otherwise) nor any fresh mushrooms (and canned mushrooms are just not the same when it comes to salads), so I kept it simple. And I downsized the dressing recipe for just the 4-6 servings worth of fresh spinach I'd picked up for a whopping 61¢ over the weekend. Today's plate was the last of my spinach and dressing *sigh* Would that spinach would stay "in season" at that price all summer! It won't.