Chocolate with salt

Lately I struggle to find the time and leisure to write. I don't know if I should blame it on the sleepless nights due to my baby boy or the famous springtime lethargy.
Yes, it's springtime in Windhoek and it's nice and warm and just beautiful. It's my favourite time of the year, with very nice temperatures, it's already hot, but not too hot and there are no mosquitoes, bees, moths, cockroaches and any other crawling stuff yet.
We are also busy preparing our veggie garden. This winter we decided on throwing everything out, feeding the soil and starting from the beginning and I promised myself to learn from my mistakes made the last years and hope we will have a bigger yield this year. I would also like to invest more time in my garden and I'm really looking forward to it.
With the beginning of the spring and the temperatures rising, our appetite for salads is back. What a better way of saying goodbye to the winter than with a combination of winter salad with fresh and young beetroot.
I must honestly admit, that I wasn't sure, if beetroot is edible raw. Only when I started researching for that matter I realised, that I was drinking beetroot juice for ages without giving it a thought for once. So the obvious answer is, yes, beetroot is edible raw and very healthy.
To make the salad substantial, I added my gratinated goats cheese croutons was a match made in heaven  with the sweetness of the beetroot and the fruitiness of the pear.

The following salad is absolute my favourite, for many years already. The idea or let's better say the original, as I'm making it exactly as I ate it for the first time, came from a restaurant in Berlin, Steglitz. The salad was named after the restaurant itself and is until today their biggest seller. 
As I made it a few days ago, after a really long time, I had the feeling, I forgot something. When I looked up, if the restaurant still exists, it hit me right away: I forgot the potato croutons. So even if they are not on the picture, the recipe is not complete without the potato croutons.
The salad is for me of course connected to a lot of memories, but even so  the combination of the flavours and textures is amazing. What I like most, to my surprise, is the combination of cucumber, orange and avocado. I'm always placing these ingredients together on the plate, so they are enjoyed together.
The only thing I'm missing, is the fantastic herbed feta they used, it was very soft and not as salty in taste as the one I'm getting here. Still, the salad is in my opinion one of the best.
So, there is not much to say, just try it out and I hope you'll love that salad as much as I do. 
Leafy salad with herbed Feta, avocado and oranges

One of our all-time-favourites are wraps. They are not only done quickly, but are mostly light and always delicious. We eat them filled with either chicken and salad, or with mince, corn and beans for the richer version. Or as this time, with tuna.  I didn't have the ingredients for my usual tuna wrap (I will post about the next occasion), so I thought I will take a filling, that was initially a salad, inspired by that recipe (in German language). 
At this point I must confess, that I didn't do the wraps myself but used store bought wraps. I tried to do them once and it went horribly wrong. But it doesn't mean, I won't try it again, one day. For now the store bought must do it - and they are delicious too.

The rain just doesn't want to come and we are over a month late this year. Every day we have cloud covered skies, yesterday we even had thunder, but still no rain. The days are so hot by now, that even me, who normally doesn't mind, just wishes the rain to fall. The Namibians are praying and wishing for nothing else then rain at the moment.

Wouldn't we have such nice organic ice cream, I would say, the weather is perfect for loosing some weight (I'm trying to get rid of my pregnancy fat), but yeah, we have extremely good ice cream , so no, no weight loss here.

Still, I love salads, no matter what weather we have and when it's as hot as it is at the moment, I don't want to eat anything else. But Namibia has a tradition of eating primarily meat. I got to know people, who said, they don't eat anything green or others, who said, they don't eat meat, the cow has had already enough grass. So you can imagine it's kind of difficult to introduce salads as a main course.

Therefore I thought, why not combine meat with a nice salad to start with. Normally I would have taken a rump steak, but we've got the opportunity to buy veal, that's why the following salad is with veal stripes.

It's summer in Namibia and extremely hot this year. The rain just doesn't want to come and everybody is eagerly awaiting the weather to change. Nobody feels like eating this days, including me and I find it extremely difficult to come up with any recipe what so ever. However, we must eat something. The challenge nowadays is to find something light but substantial, preferable salads.
In December my husband and I watched a cooking show on television, I think it was Christmas with Jamie or something similar, I can't really recall. They served goats cheese with fresh figs and walnuts. Straightaway I was back with my thoughts in my little French restaurant I was managing for a while back in Berlin and remembered the amazing salad served with gratinated goats cheese.

So, a few days ago we had our

Gratinated goats cheese croutons on a bed of baby leaf salad with caramelised figs and roasted walnuts