Blood Orange Breakfast Salad – Vegan and Vegetarian Options

Rethink breakfast with this Blood Orange Breakfast Salad made with juicy blood oranges, vanilla-scented persimmons, fresh mint, and a hint of red onion, all topped with a lusciously creamy, salty dollop of either Macedonian feta or salted vegan cream cheese.

Preparing Blood Orange Breakfast Salad

This salad is easy to prepare. You just need to slice the fruit and mint, and then make the dressing. For the fruit, I used vanilla persimmons and blood oranges, but this would also be good with mangos and more commonly available oranges, such as Cara Cara oranges.

For the dressing, you combine some of the fresh orange juice with some salad oil and your sweetener of choice.

If you’re vegetarian, you’ll top this with feta cheese. Macedonian feta is my cheese of choice. Macedonia feta is to regular feta as heavy cream is to skim milk — it’s just that much creamier. It pairs beautifully with the fresh fruit and mint.

If you’re vegan, we’re achieving a similar effect with salted cream cheeze. What is salted cream cheeze, you ask? It’s as simple as it sounds — you add a good pinch of salt to some store bought cream cheeze. The taste and texture aren’t exactly the same as the feta, but I was pleasantly surprised at how good an alternative it was.

Eating Together Made Easy

This Blood Orange Breakfast Salad is simple to make either vegetarian or vegan. The only difference is the cheese on top. Vegetarian’s use Macedonian feta and vegan’s use vegan cream cheese, with some salt added.

PIN Blood Orange Breakfast Salad

Styling Blood Orange Breakfast Salad: The Agony and the Ecstasy

Actually, it was pretty much all agony.
This is a really tasty salad!
But those bloody *$%@ oranges!
I tried styling them as segments, as sections of slices, and then finally as whole slices. The whole slices looked the best, but all my slices were off kilter, so I realized I needed to bring out the mandoline.
I had to get Mikael to do the mandolining, because frankly that contraption scares me. Mikael almost lost the top of his finger on it before, when he was helping me make this awesome Thai Apple Salad. I guess you’d think that would dissuade HIM from using the mandoline — well, he didn’t balk at it, but I stood by watching, with this tight, sick feeling in my stomach, remembering HIS injury!
Once that little drama was over came the task of trying to place those flimsy, almost translucent pieces of fruit flat on a white plate without creating an edible Rorschach out of dripping blood orange juice.
Next, I had to meticulously paper towel up all the juice that released from the oranges while I was trying to figure out the lighting and try to take a good photo.
I’ve gotten a lot better about tidying up my plates before taking pictures (And I’ve also gotten a lot better at photoshopping out mistakes!) But cause my close-up vision ain’t what it used to be, I sometimes can’t see problems with the plate until AFTER I’ve taken the photo and transferred it to my gigantic monitor.
Clearly though, this one should have registered as obviously messy, even with my bad eyes!

While this one was less messy, it didn’t do the blood orange justice.

Here’s one where I was trying the vegetarian version on a white plate and the vegan on the black. The black hid the juice issues a bit better, but ultimately I decided the black plate was too dark, at least for my skill level. I also decided that the vegan and the vegetarian are so similar that it wasn’t necessary to do two separate shots.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into when it comes to food styling and food photography!

Show me your breakfast salad!

If you make this, I’d love to see your shots. If you post them on Instagram, be sure to hashtag #notnotnutritious and #eatingtogethermade easy, especially if you make both the vegan and vegetarian versions.
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Thanks for reading!
Sylvia