I love me a big fat juicy strawberry. I am however allergic to Strawberries, or so I am told. Normally I eat strawberries and I break out in a itchy rash that covers from head to toe and in every nook and cranny you can think of.

But this tiny little detail doesn’t stop me from buying the forbidden pink fruit every other week when we go shopping. It just looks so juicy and inviting. Touch wood, when I ate this salad, I didn’t break out in a rash, I just broke out in a fit of sneezes for about 4 hours and after I sneezed a few brain cells out and went through a few meters of tissue paper I was fine. My parents on the other head were not. After the 10^th bless you, they kept telling me to shut up and blow my noise and after the 10^th blow, they told me to put a sock up my trumpet they couldn’t think anymore. So much for love when your child is sick.

I can’t remember where I cam across this recipe, but when I saw goat’s cheese and strawberry in the same sentence, I knew I just had to try it out.

The recipe itself is super duper easy. I mean every salad is easy, you just throw a few things together, shake a few things together and then mix a few things together. How hard could a salad be.

Let me just saw this, when you make a salad for family, untidy is fine, when you make a salad to take a pic of, you need to be neat, every ingredient needs to be visible so that the audience can at least see that the recipe asks for tomatoes, and you have incorporated tomatoes, you have not just omitted it.

After carefully arranging the red onion for the 10^th time, I was just about ready to pull my hair out and give up and just let the family devour it, but seeing as I was putting my life on the line with the strawberries, I might as well just suck it up and keep rearranging the salad till it was picture perfect.

Verdict, my dad told me he was confused, he wasn’t sure if he was eating a fruit salad or a vegetable salad or a cheese salad. My mother, make me pick out each and every onion slice, each and every halved tomatoe and each and every pepper piece, Lord have mercy on me, this women and her tastes. I should have just fed her cucumber and mint leaves and save myself the stress of trying to get them to eat new things. I love it, would I eat it again, nope because I can not play Russian roulette with my strawberry allergies.

Ingredients:

• 8 x strawberries, washed and halved.
• 1 x red pepper, roughly chopped.
• 1 x cucumber, thinly sliced.
• 1 x red onion, peeled and thinly sliced.
• 10 x cherry tomatoes, washed and halved.
• ½ x cup mint leaves, roughly chopped.
• Salt and pepper to season.
• 200g x goat cheese, roughly crumbled.
• Whisk together 2 x tbsp balsamic vinegar and 2 x tbsp olive oil and this will become the dressing:

Method:

• Arrange all the ingredients in a salad bowl, season well and drizzle over the dressing before serving.