• Article Author: Salvatore Cesareo
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Looking for easy and quick, fresh salad ideas? Treat your taste buds to something new or wow your guests with some great pomegranate salad recipes and your own home made pomegranate salad vinaigrette.

Pomegranate salad recipes offer a new, exciting flavor blast and will definitely help you stick to eating healthier. In fact besides just finding tasty ways to reinvent salads, pomegranate itself has long been heralded for its health benefits and has been used in traditional Ayurvedic medicine for centuries. It isn’t just a myth either. Clinical trials and lab research has also shown many tangible health benefits of consuming the fruit, even in an incredibly short period of time. These include reducing heart disease, reducing high blood pressure and increasing levels of antioxidants as well as helping to fight against many viral infections.

Making fresh pomegranate vinaigrette or trying out new pomegranate salad recipes all starts with extracting the edible seeds or arils. The easiest way to do this is to score the fruit and then break it open. Do this into a bowl of water and you will find the seeds easily separated and ready to go.

You will find pomegranate in season in North America between September and February, offering a great time to mix it with other seasonal fruits and vegetables for a colorful late fall and winter salad that explodes on the palate. Try experimenting with your pomegranate salad recipes on mixed salad greens, arugula and spinach.

A few easy and quick pomegranate salad recipes and combinations you may want to try out include:

• Walnuts, alfalfa sprouts, red onion and crumbled feta
• Apples, walnuts, bacon and blue cheese
• Fennel, Mandarin oranges and apple
• Arugula and toasted pecans
• Golden beets, feta cheese and red onion
• Walnuts and dried cranberries
• Fennel, green beans, watercress and dandelion greens

 

You can also create chopped pomegranate salad recipes for using as side dishes or colorful garnishes on your plates. Try mixing chopped cucumbers, garlic, garbanzo beans, pomegranate and basil leaves.

Making your own pomegranate vinaigrette is very easy and quick too. You can play around with your own salad vinaigrette recipe to get just the taste you want but the basics call for pomegranate juice, olive oil and vinegar. You could cheat and use POM juice, but making your own fresh is of course much better. Remember not to use extra virgin olive oil and you can also substitute with sunflower oil. For vinegar, again your options are open. Red wine, white wine or rice wine vinegar can be used. Then add a dash of Dijon mustard or honey, salt and pepper and mix.

Now get out there and start experimenting with your own pomegranate vinaigrette and easy to make pomegranate salad recipes.