Summer Tomato Salad with Beets, Plums, and Feta

Summer Tomato Salad with Beets, Plums, Walnuts, and Feta

This Tomato Salad is full of the summer’s best produce. It’s got beets, plums, three kinds of tomatoes, feta, and walnuts. All dressed with pure and simple olive oil and real aged balsamic.  Lemon verbena, basil, or mint top the salad. Simple, healthy, easy, and beautiful. Jump straight to the recipe for this vibrant salad.

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

I arrive two hours late— rumpled and sweaty from the needlessly long drive. Thanks, Siri. Road weary, I tromp up the street with my oversized handbag and jam-packed cooler. The angst I acquired on the ride instantly melts away when I see Ruby and Heather parked on Jocelyn’s little porch.

Nearing my destination I feel the joy pouring onto the the street. Today is a sweet day, a day for celebration, a big birthday made more meaningful by the difficult months preceding it.

Just weeks before, I joined Heather and Ruby at Jocelyn’s bedside as she recovered from a double mastectomy. Only a few weeks before that, I held my breath as we waited for the results from a scan showing suspicious spots on Jocelyn’s lungs- only to learn that her lungs were clear, but her genetic panel not so much.

Over the past several months, I faced the lingering fear and sadness from my own mother’s death from cancer. But, Jocelyn’s story is not like my mother’s. And so, I am in her little oasis of a home for a birthday party. Jocelyn is 70. She is healthy, beautiful, and vibrant. For than I am grateful.

I began the morning by picking the juiciest most relentlessly cheerful tomatoes from my garden. I plucked the last of the sun-drunk plums from the tree, I cut lemon verbena, and pulled the last of my roasted beets from the refrigerator. These beautiful ingredients come together in a salad that says “FUCK cancer”. The salad says, let’s party, and embrace life, and choose gratitude.

Summer Tomato Salad with Beets, Plums, and Feta

Perhaps it’s a bit much to imbue a salad with all of these qualities. Perhaps it’s too aggrandizing to think of a salad as life-affirming, but I’m going to go with it.

Here’s to Jocelyn, for being one of the mothers in my life. Here’s to her beauty and courage and here’s to living vibrantly, every day.

ce

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Tomato Salad with Plums, Beets, and Feta

Rating  5.0 from 3 reviews

Prep time:  10 mins

Total time:  10 mins

Serves: 8 servings

The summer's best tomatoes and plums come together with beets, feta, and walnuts to make a simple and beautiful salad.

Ingredients

• ½ lb cooked beets, peeled and sliced
• 3 lbs heirloom tomatoes, thickly sliced
• ½ cup cherry tomatoes, halved
• ½ lb ripe plums, sliced into 8 wedges each
• ½ cup crumbled feta cheese
• ½ cup walnut pieces
• ¼ cup olive oil
• 2 tablespoons aged balsamic
• finishing salt
• fresh cracked pepper
• fresh herbs like lemon verbena or lemon basil

Instructions

1. On a large platter, layer beets, tomatoes, and plums adding a drizzle of olive oil and vinegar between each layer. Top with feta, walnut, and more olive oil and vinegar. Top with herbs and finish with salt and pepper.

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