Beetroot Salad with Whipped Feta, Bacon, Roasted Olives and Toasted Pecan Nuts
A Healthy Side to Serve this December Holiday
With December here, Christmas is fast approaching and so over the next few weeks I will be sharing my favourite Christmas recipes. This Beetroot Salad with Whipped Feta, Bacon, Roasted Olives and Toasted Pecan Nuts is a crowd pleaser. To make a vegetarian version, you can replace the bacon with citrus slices.
Ingredients
320 gram True Roots Whole Baby Beetroot
100g drained Pick n Pay Green Olives
100g Pecan nuts
1/2 Red onion
200g Eskort shoulder bacon
2 disks of Feta
a handful of Rocket
Extra-virgin Olive Oil for frying
Salt and freshly Ground Black Pepper
How to make the salad
Drain the whole baby beetroots but keep the vinegar pickling liquid aside.
Take about half the vinegar and mix it with the two disks of feta in a blender or food processor. Add some milk to get the texture smooth like a cream cheese.
Toast the pecan nuts without oil in a pan.
Thinly slice the red onion.
Cut the shoulder bacon into slices, then fry in a small amount of olive oil in the same pan used for the pecan nuts.
Take the bacon out and add the olives while the pan is still hot. Blister the olives in the bacon oil.
Assemble your salad by generously smoothing out the whipped feta & beetroot juice mix, then add rocket and whole baby beetroots and continue layering the rest of the ingredients. Top with some blue cheese dressing. and serve!
Enjoy! Please tag me on Instagram if you’ve made this recipe, I’d love to see it!
See below for more Salad Recipes:
About Shawn Godfrey
Photo credit: Niki M Photography
Shawn Godfrey is an entrepreneur based in Cape Town, South Africa. After the Covid-19 lockdown saw his business in financial distress, cooking was the creative outlet that helped to keep him sane. To keep track of his recipes, and encourage friends and families to join him, he starts his instagram account The Roasted Dad.
Fast-forward to late 2021 - on a whim Shawn (encouraged by his wife Lianne) enters MasterChef South Africa. It is a crazy time of life: running a 200 people business and struggling to keep it profitable, two small children with a third on the way, and about to move into a new house. But when Shawn gets selected to be one of the 20 contestants participating in the fourth season of MasterChef South Africa, he decides to go all in. Leaving his 7-month-pregnant wife to look after their then three and one-year-old children, he battles it out and comes back home five weeks later with the trophy and a million rand prize money in his pocket.
It all started with an Instagram account, but The Roasted Dad is so much more now. Shawn has stayed his entrepreneurial self and whilst he hosts Private Dinner Parties and Cook-with-Me Demos, does Restaurant Take-Overs, he still runs the lighting company and several other businesses.
On his blog, Shawn shares Restaurant Reviews and Accommodation Reviews, and gives an insight into the wild and wonderful life he leads together with his wife Lianne, and their three children Aiden (6), Olivia (4) and Harvey (2).
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