I think all of you know the original Italian Caprese salad made of tomatoes, mozzarella basil leaves and olive oil. It’s really easy to prepare, but after eating it a couple of times it becomes boring. For this reason I started thinking about how I can jazz it up a little bit and incorporate some of my favorite ingredients that are not included. These are garlic, avocado and olives.

Some weeks ago I saw in the supermarket fresh rocket pesto (Rucola pesto) which I thought might be good idea to use. After trying it once or twice I think that it’s a good alternative to the basil leaves. So I decided to prepare it at home and use it to jazz up my salads. It proved my assumption to be super easy.
So this is my variation of the Caprese salad:
- 150g cherry tomatoes
- 125g mozzarella (preferably mini balls)
- 1 avocado
- olive oil
- salt
For the rocket pesto:
- 75ml olive oil
- 75g rocket salad
- 75g parmesan cheese
- 50g almonds
- 1 or 2 garlic cloves
- 25g parsley
Chop the Parmesan in small pieces. Wash and dry the rocket salad. Put all ingredients for the pesto in a blender and mix well. Ready is the fresh rocket pesto.
Mix the cherry tomatoes and the mozzarella balls with one or two spoons of the pesto. Peel the avocado and cut it into slices. Arrange avocado slices on a plate and put on top the tomatoes, mozzarella mix. If the final look of the salad is not important you can also chop the avocado into dices and mix it also with the rest.

A tasty variation of the salad can be made by adding black olives. This is actually my favorite version, as I am a real black olives junky.
The colors – red white and green are the one of the italian flag so the dish is one of the national italian dishes. But as these are also the colors of the Bulgarian flag but in a different order, I think that my variation can be called Bulgarese 🙂
Maybe you have time to try it out over the Easter holidays.
Mrs. Bräumelova
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