Beetroot Salad with Feta and Pear

This healthy and colorful salad can be a perfect addition to meat dishes, and also serve as a nice meal on its own if you prefer to pursue a vegetarian lifestyle.

Beetroot is well-known for its indispensable health benefits. Betacyanin, a colorful pigment in beetroot, is an antioxidant that can significantly help your liver get rid of toxins, and thus improve its main function to keep your body clean by absorbing all the harmful chemicals from your blood. Beetroot also contains betaine, a substance can be used to help with some forms of depression due to its ability to relax your mind and improve general sense of well being.

For healthy reasons we prefer using homemade sauces and condiments to those bought in a supermarket. There is value in making something from scratch, and you can always control what comes in a recipe and what quality product comes out of it. We used homemade pickled red onions for this beetroot salad. We recommend marinating some onions at the same time as you start cooking beetroot, or even some time in advance, it can be perfectly stored in the fridge and used for other dishes.

We know that a lot of people out there like beetroot but don’t like to bother with cooking it because the process seems time and energy consuming. If you are one of those people, we invite you to check out our *How to cook beetroot* (or Easy ways to cook beetroot).

We hope you like this beetroot salad as much as we do, and will learn to love beetroot not only for its health benefits but also for its taste and color!

1. Place the beetroot in a pot and cover with water. Bring to the boil and cook the beetroots until soft (you can easily stick a fork into it). Drain the water and cool slightly. Alternatively use one of our suggested easy ways to cook beetroot .

2. Peel and slice the beetroot into wedges or cut into cubes (if you like, use kitchen gloves for the peeling part to avoid staining your hands pink), cut pear, feta and roughly chop rocket salad.

3. To make the dressing, combine the oil, honey, lemon juice, salt and mustard, and mix well. Taste and adjust to your liking.

4. Combine all salad ingredients. Add pickled red onions (you can use our quick pickled red onions recipe to make your own instead of store-bought). When ready to serve, pour the dressing over the salad and toss lightly to combine.