Salads, for the most part, are some of the easiest ways to eat gluten-free and even better, they’re one of the best summer meals. This orange and grapefruit salad is super simple to make and looks pretty enough to take to a cookout, so enjoy!
Here’s what you’ll need:
For the salad –
2 Oranges
1 Grapefruit
1 Sprig of basil
For the dressing –
1 Tbsp. honey
1 Tbsp. moscato
1 Pinch of salt
Let’s start:
First, mix the wine (moscato is my preference since it’s already sweet) and honey in a bowl with a fork until all of the honey has dissolved. This can take a bit of time depending on how cold your wine is, but be patient. Then do a taste test. Cause why not? Well actually... you to need to familiarize yourself with the flavor before you add the salt. Now add the tiniest pinch of salt and taste test again. This should make it slightly sweeter and for some reason bring out the flavor of the wine a bit more. Based on your taste test figure out if you prefer adding more salt or stopping now. Then put that off to the side and get ready to get a little messy.
For the salad –
2 Oranges
1 Grapefruit
1 Sprig of basil
For the dressing –
1 Tbsp. honey
1 Tbsp. moscato
1 Pinch of salt
Let’s start:
First, mix the wine (moscato is my preference since it’s already sweet) and honey in a bowl with a fork until all of the honey has dissolved. This can take a bit of time depending on how cold your wine is, but be patient. Then do a taste test. Cause why not? Well actually... you to need to familiarize yourself with the flavor before you add the salt. Now add the tiniest pinch of salt and taste test again. This should make it slightly sweeter and for some reason bring out the flavor of the wine a bit more. Based on your taste test figure out if you prefer adding more salt or stopping now. Then put that off to the side and get ready to get a little messy.
You need to cut the top and bottom off your oranges and grapefruit. This is also great cause it helps give you a base for the next step.
Next, you’re going to slowly cut off the rest of the peel like you can see in my picture.
After that’s done, you should be able to see small white lines around the fruit where if you had peeled it, you would have been able to separate the fruit into segments. You’re going to use these white lines as a guide for cutting out each segment (you don’t want any of that white line on the segment of fruit you remove). A little trick: the last segment tends to be the hardest because by that time most of the fruit is gone so you don’t have a great base to cut against. To help prevent this, when you cut your first segment out, cut inside the white line on the right of the segment and in AND outside of the white line to the left of the segment. Then keep working to the segment on the right. This way, by the time you get to the last segment, the tricky side will already be cut. That probably sounds confusing, but I promise it’s not that bad once you try it out.
Once you’re done, pick off a sprig of basil. If you have a basil plant, pick off the little beginning of a shoot before going for the bigger leaves at the bottom. This may seem counter intuitive because you want more basil right? and this is the bud, but this way your plant will start to get fuller. If you only grab the base leaves, you’ll end up with a long spindly plant.
Tear the basil into small bits and add it to the fruit. Then, add the dressing and you’re good to go!
The oranges and grapefruit I had were abnormally small, but if you use average sized fruit it should make enough for two people. Want more? Just double the dressing and keep adding fruit.