Vegetarian Greek salad - Horiatiki
( Insalata greca con feta )

Greek salad (Horiatiki) recipe

Preparation

• - Prepare all vegetables.
  Peel and slice cucumbers. If tender and organic, you can avoid peeling them.
  Clean and wash bell peppers and tomatoes and pat dry with kitchen paper. Cube them according to your habit, not too small.
  Peel and slice onion, finely.
  Wash chives and pat dry with kitchen paper.
• - Put all your vegetables in a bowl, included chives cut into little pieces.
  Add olive oil and olives.
  Season to taste with little salt.
  If you like, add freshly ground black pepper.
  Stir all these ingredients, with delicacy.
• - Crumble or cut feta cheese. Add it to your plate, on the top.

Just before serving

• - Your dish is ready to serve.
• - To make it more scenographic, you can serve it on seasonal salad leaves. They will be very tasty once eaten all the other ingredients and then you can enjoy them at the end.

Note

Tips

• - Prepare this dish immediately before serving, otherwise tomatoes and cucumbers coud release their vegetation water and make it less appetizing.
• - Someone adds wild fennel and other seasonal ingredients, but this depends on your personal taste. Capers are added in the Greek Isles.
  Traditionalists combine rye croutons too and in this case they prepare it in advance so that croutons can soak the liquids of the various ingredients.
• - The color of bell peppers and so their taste is another variant. Red and yellow bell peppers are more fleshy and sweet while the green ones are decidedly different. They can be spicy and definitely more crisp. The choice is yours.

Menu planning

• - Typically, the Greek salad is served as a side dish and with these doses can accompany 4 or more servings of meat or fish.
  I prefer to serve it as a main dish for my family summer dinners. The reason in the healthy notes, below.
• - Sometimes, I serve it as vegetarian antipasto, waiting for meat of fish grilled in my BBQ dinner party.

Healthy eating

• - Let me explain why it is better for me to serve the Greek salad as a main dish. If you check its nutritional value, you can imagine easily. The presence of cheese and olives enriches it very much, from all points of view. If you combine it to meat or fish, calories, protein and fat increase significantly.
• - Fiber per serving: 6.6 grams (daily intake = 30 grams).
• - If you need to reduce its calories, you can remove all olives and decrease olive oil to two teaspoons. Here are the values in this case:
  calories: 246 (1028 kJ)
  protein: 10.3g
  total fat: 16.5g
  total carbo: 14.5g
  sugars: 14.5g
  fiber: 5.8g
• - I also calculated the calories of this meal if you combine a portion of bread too (50g - 1 3/4 ounces). Near, in brackets, RDA that is the Recommended Daily Allowance relative to 2000 calories per day:
  calories: 470 (1967 kJ) (24%)
  protein: 15.1g (30%)
  total fat: 26.8g (38%)
  total carbo: 44.5g (16%)
  sugars: 15.8g (18%)
  fiber: 8.1g

Loretta

What's the right wine for " Vegetarian Greek salad - Horiatiki "?

My husband and I always prefer a fresh light beer but you can also match a white wine as the Friulian Ribolla gialla