Salads and Salad Dressings

Tzatziki Sauce

September 13, 2021 by Lindsay 16 Comments

This easy homemade tzatziki sauce has just 6 ingredients and can be made in half an hour or less. It's a delicious condiment for crispy chicken cutlets or served as a ranch dressing alternative for dipping veggies! I love having a batch of this in the fridge for parties or quick snacks (or to go nuts with a Mediterranean charcuterie board!).

side view of greek yogurt tzatziki sauce with pita on the side and fresh mint leaves.

Tzatziki sauce is delicious and amazing and versatile. Tzatziki is a traditional Greek/Turkish condiment, and this version uses Greek yogurt as the base. I've had variations with sour cream and even feta cheese, but this is my favorite way to eat it.

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Vegan Potato Salad

July 27, 2021 by Lindsay 1 Comment

This vegan potato salad with no mayo is a super easy summer side dish that comes together with just a few ingredients! It tastes just like salt and vinegar potato chips, has tons of fresh herbs, and can be served warm or at room temp. I love it with cast iron skillet salmon for a delicious weeknight dinner, or as a summer potluck side dish offering.

Hello, hello flavors of middle school chip dreams wrapped up in some adult ingredients.

LOOK! It's a no mayo potato salad!

Listen, I love super fatty, carby side dishes in the summer. Seriously. A lot. BUT, I'm also into dishes that can feed a variety of dishes and are light enough that we can Eat All The Things and not feel uncomfortably full.

Like this vegan potato salad! This is one of those side dishes that goes with ANYTHING all summer, and the flavor combo is riiiight in the middle of salt and vinegar and sour cream and onion potato chips, aka heaven.

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Vegan Tabouli Salad

July 6, 2021 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

Delicious, easy vegan tabouli salad with marinated chickpeas that is the perfect light lunch! We serve this often as a side dish for grilled chicken or baked tofu, or take it to summer potlucks for a yummy vegan side dish.

gray pottery bowl of vegan tabouli salad topped with parsley and marinated garbanzo beans with blue napkins

I. Love. Summer.

I love the feeling of school being out. I love the heat and humidity, even when I bitch about it. I love the longer days, the smell of gardenias, going to hear music downtown, the whole cliché shebang.

I especially LOVE summer-feeling food. Grilled meat with fresh or raw side dishes, that great mix of healthy and decadent, salads so fresh and crisp that they somehow quench your thirst, you know?

This tabouli is one of those salads for our family, and I can't get enough. My mom used to make picnics of hummus and tabouli and pita long before those things were cool, and bring them to the pool late swim practices in the summer. She made both with a heavy hand of lemon, one of my favorite flavors for dishes like this.

This version of tabouli is a teensy bit jazzed up with marinating the chick peas, but that's super hands off and can be done way in advance - the longer in advance the better, actually. The garbanzos end up creamy but still with texture and so much flavor from the lemon juice, garlic, and crushed red pepper. I honestly can't even.

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Vegan Pasta Salad with Roasted Veggies

June 24, 2021 by Lindsay 2 Comments

Yummy vegan pasta salad is the perfect summer side dish! I make this with any seasonal veggies I have on hand, pine nuts, and lots of fresh herbs and lemon vinaigrette for brightness. Change up the veggies, pasta shape, and herbs each time for a fresh take on this yummy, healthy side dish!

large serving bowl of vegan pasta salad with asparagus and tomatoes

I just finished the book Hello, Summer and tbh want to start all recipes like this with OH, HELLO SUMMER, but it feels kind of redundant.

Know that I'm thinking it, though.

This is, to me, the pasta salad to end all pasta salads. It's light, fresh, and full of summery flavors. I love that it's vegan because lots of different types of eaters can eat it, and almost every aspect of it can be switched up based on what you have on hand. Different nuts, veggies, fresh herbs, it all works.

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13 Recipes For Memorial Day

May 26, 2021 by Lindsay 1 Comment

Ohhhhhhhh long weekend, I am so excited for you.

We are in a weird busy all the time but standing still because it's kind of still a pandemic place. This time last year there was a decided air of "but are we allowed to do anything," and now it's a little....lighter.

In preparation for whatever you might be doing this weekend, hopefully with a few more folks than last year, here are my absolute favorite recipes for Memorial Day!

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Spring Salad with Asparagus

March 30, 2021 by Lindsay 3 Comments

This raw bok choy salad with asparagus and peas is the most delicious easy salad! A no-dressing dressing with lemon juice and olive oil + some fresh parmesan rounds out this gluten free side or main dish. Round this spring salad out with some favorite grilled chicken and shortcut focaccia, or serve this as a cold vegetable side dish!

It's another non-dressing salad, aka my favorite way to throw together a super quick and fresh meal.

Farmer's markets are finally coming back, which means we are in Spring Greens heaven, and so many of these ingredients are able to be found locally right now.

The gist is this: raw greens, fresh herbs, and a few choice veggies blanched super quickly in salted water that get cooled and served on top. Salt, pepper, lemon juice, olive oil, and parmesan top the dish for flavor, so we don't need to mess with making a dressing.

I LOVE salads like this this time of year, because you can customize them based on what you like or have in your fridge that needs to be used up. Literally any veggie, herb, or cheese can be swapped out here, this is just a combination that I love.

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Meal Prep Chicken Grain Bowls

February 16, 2021 by Lindsay 7 Comments

Meal prep chicken grain bowls with all of your favorite toppings! We're going super easy for meal prep with one dressing for the chicken marinade and salad, a few chopped veggies, and lots and lots of time saved during the week now that your meal prep lunches are made!

Mmmmmmm meal prep ideas for lunch, aka something I think about almost every week. It's been one of the hardest things about quarantine for me; very few opportunities to leave the house for lunch and very little desire to have leftovers since we cook 7 dinners per week now too.

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Favorite Grilled Chicken Salad

January 11, 2021 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

Featuring our favorite marinade for grilled chicken, this salad with goat cheese and walnuts is one that we make often for main dish salad dinners or for meal prep! The combo of tangy dressing, maple marinade, and creamy goat cheese is just the best ever. No boring main dish salads here!

Hello and hi! How are we managing in this pandemic coup? Are we being gentle with our New Year's Resolutions? Please say yes.

One thing that we have been trying to do for a few months is making one "lunchy" item during our meal prep. Not focusing only on dinners helps us stay away from takeout (which I'm such a sucker for especially on days where I don't have anywhere to go), and having super yummy foods in the fridge to grab just overall makes our workdays at home feel more enjoyable.

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Basic Lemon Vinaigrette

September 28, 2020 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

This easy lemon vinaigrette recipe has just 5 ingredients and is done in under 10 minutes. I love to make a batch of this each week to have for easy salads. Bonus: use any kind of sweetener (honey, agave) or mustard you like to switch this dressing up each time!

Hey hey hey, lemon dressing!

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3-Ingredient Smashed Cucumbers

July 22, 2020 by Lindsay 1 Comment

Easy, light, and refreshing, this 3-ingredient smashed cucumbers recipe is done in just 30 minutes. The result is the most delicious, juicy cucumber bites. These are vegan, gluten free, and dairy free.

Oh heyyyyyyy not really a recipe recipe!

That's honestly all the brainpower I have in quarantine week, 8,276 you're welcome.

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Easy Chicken Larb

January 7, 2020 by Lindsay 2 Comments

This Thai chicken larb recipe (sometimes seen as chicken laarb on menus!) is so quick and easy thanks to the use of ground chicken. We love making this for meal prep with extra dressing and using it on salads or in rice bowls all week. It's gluten free and wildly delicious thanks to a fish sauce lime vinaigrette.

close up image of thai ground chicken lettuce wraps with lime wedges on the edge.

IknowIknowIknow.

Maybe not the most inspired thing to do for our first 2020 recipe, but inspired is not what we're attempting here. Delicious is. Chicken larb is delicious.

Jay usually does some kind of January ... eating thing ... which, is fine. I could go on and on about how I don't do things like that for a variety of reasons that I feel strongly about, but I'm also happy to support people in my life that try to make healthier choices.

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Summery Caprese Cobb Salad with Grilled Chicken

August 6, 2019 by Lindsay 1 Comment

A summertime recipe for cobb salad that includes grilled chicken AND corn plus caprese salad ingredients with fresh, juicy tomatoes, mozzarella, and a super easy basil pesto salad dressing that is out of this world delish. This is also a great meal prep kale salad!

Oh hello, here's a salad we can SINK OUR TEETH INTO. Finally.

I'm all about a main dish salad. I order them often in restaurants because I want to, not because I'm punishing myself for something or feel like I should. BUT, the salad's gotta be a good one. House made dressings, fun protein choices, crunchy things, etc. If salads on a menu don't look good, I'm heading straight for ordering a dinner entree during brunch because the smothered chicken is just always so legit, right?

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Spicy Peanut Chopped Salad

April 17, 2019 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

MEAL PREP THIS FOR SURE.

Spicy Peanut Sauce with red cabbage chopped salad. Perfect for meal prepping!

Alternative Title: The Time Beck Discovered Chow Mein Noodles and Now That's All She Wants To Eat.

And honestly, who can blame her? This spicy peanut chopped salad is one of my favorite things to do with the Spicy Peanut Sauce I posted on Monday. We use it in hot and cold dishes which allows it to taste super different aka behave like two sauces aka two for one aka measure twice cut once? I don't know.

I posted on Monday. We use it in hot and cold dishes which allows it to taste super different aka behave like two sauces aka two for one aka measure twice cut once? I don't know.

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Mustard Nicoise Salad

March 26, 2019 by Lindsay 1 Comment

Oh, hey.

Here is a nicoise salad that is full of texture and interest, can be meal prepped or served warm/room temperature, includes veggies and carbs and protein, and has a to-die-for flavor base. So that checks a lot of boxes.

Salads-as-boring is kind of a tired old story, but maybe a truthful one nonetheless. I'm always looking for salads with lots of STUFF on them. One of my favorite things to order at delis is a salad sampler kind of thing, and nicoise salads are that way naturally.

I've seen lots of versions of nicoise salads - some with rice instead of potatoes, fresh tuna instead of canned, and lots of have olives and eggs. I don't like eggs and Jay doesn't like olives, so you understand why those two items are missing here.

The KEY to this salad is that we make one mustard base, then use it in different ways in the tuna, green beans, potatoes, AND salad dressing. This takes some steps out of the dish since we don't have to make all separate sauces, and each component tastes slightly different while also belonging together from the mustard.

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Our Favorite Kale Salad

March 21, 2019 by Lindsay 7 Comments

Happy birthday to me!

I'm 33 today. I had a lovely celebration with my family last weekend, and this week has been positively BRUTAL with sick kids and house showings and work and honestly all of our knees are really sore. That's not to say I'm not in a birthday mood, I am.

I'm just in a kale birthday mood. Don't really have time to stop and have a gazillion calories of sugar that will make me feel crappy in two hours. Need vegetables to avoid eating french fries aka my feelings at every turn. It's a very 33 birthday mood, for sure.

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Lemon Thyme Shrimp Caesar Salad

March 6, 2019 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

WITH BROCCOLINI IT'S SO HEALTHY.

Ok I will not shout anymore. But, seriously. These salads? NOT the TGIFriday's sadclownface Caesars with goopy dressing that I ate in high school "for something light." Ugh. If I do nothing in life, it will be to teach Beck just how to eat like a person for how she feels, and disregard any internal or external pressure to look a certain way. I have been SO anxious about this recently, the fear that she'll hate her body and spend her whole life trying to make it look different the way, well, everyone I know does.

But this isn't about that. This is about the way I love to eat salads! Requirements are: flavor, protein, and enough ingredients that I'm not .... eating a bowl of greens. Although I have a salad coming soon that is basically a bowl of greens, so ignore everything I say.

This Lemon Thyme Shrimp Caesar Salad is SO good, and definitely feels like real cooking, which I like (rather than opening a bag of salad greens and throwing on some dressing that has definitely been in the fridge for multiple moves but it's not bad so we keep moving it). We roast tomatoes and broccolini, sear shrimp, toast croutons, and shake up a super rustic Caesar dressing with tons of lemon and fresh thyme. The whole thing together is really perfect, balanced, and feel-good without being sad-healthy, my least kind of healthy food.

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Leftover Cranberry Turkey Salad

November 19, 2018 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

YUM YUM YUM.

I've said it a gazillion times, but turkey is definitely not my favorite part of Thanksgiving. Appetizers and casseroles and wine are. Clearly.

I think that's because turkey can be underwhelming, or dry, and it DEFINITELY doesn't hold up as well in terms of leftovers like, say, some kind of buttery cheesy casserole does. Leftover turkey can be chewy and tough and just bland, but I'm NOT here to celebrate food waste, ever. So we had to do something wonderful with leftover turkey.

Add mayo, obviously was the answer. This turkey salad is so different from roast turkey from Thanksgiving day, and the addition of cranberries livens up the flavor for such a fun different twist. This would be so yummy for a brunch sometime this weekend, or on crackers/with greens for lunch or a snack. Plus: it's pink!...

Bacon Basil Panzanella

August 30, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

It's the first day of school! Beck left this morning to great fanfare and WAHHHHH MY BABY and also guilt because honestly who needs school at age two and a half so if she stop school after high school that's still sixteen more years of freaking school and also I'M FREE and also thirty weeks pregnant today so not free for long, sucker, and I'm hungry.

It's also 90 degrees here because of course it is. Climate change is a myth.

But we may as well soak it up, right? Even people who hate summer love summer; the nostalgia of freedom from school and longer days, more daylight, and freaking perfect fresh summer produce. Spring and fall greens and gourds are just nothing compared to tomatoes, corn, watermelon, and fresh herbs, so I'm going with it as long as the weather stays this warm. It's my payment for excessive heat while pregnant - watermelon.

So today we're using tomatoes and basil that are still everywhere in panzanella, aka bread salad, aka of course we should have bread in our salad. The dressing base is actually juice from the tomatoes, then we have salt, sugar, and shallot to round out the most delicious dressing. The bread gets crispy in the oven while bacon gets crispy on the stove, and honestly by the time we factor in the bacon and bread we should be just eating this for breakfast, shallot breath be damned.

I'm not above it.

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Sugar Snap Pea Salad

July 24, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

This Southern-style sugar snap pea salad is WHAT YOU NEED for hot summer day. Perfect for meal prep, a cookout, or potluck, the creamy dressing, salty bacon, and crunchy, snappy peas form the most delicious summer side dish ever. This version is gluten free!

Southern = it has bacon.

Here's our new favorite summer side dish! We are all about sugar snap peas, and this time of year when they're actually GOOD and we have a chance of finding them locally we have them around all the time. We eat a lot of raw veggies as snacks with hummus or ranch, but turning them into quick side dishes to go with grilled meat or to take to a potluck is another favorite thing to do with peas especially. There are tons of variations of this salad, and I made mine with a combination of classic Southern flavors (bacon, mayo) with some extra brightening flavors from lemon juice and fresh herbs. The combination of creamy/salty with herby freshness is SO good, and of course it goes without saying that while not a perfect superfood, this is a better choice than, say, the exact same salad base with potatoes or pasta instead of a raw veg.

Raw veggies balance bacon, is my aesthetic.

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Ramen Noodle Salad {vegan}

April 5, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

I know it's supposed to rain and snow this weekend but it's practically Mid-April so we're just going with it, ok? It's time for springy food, cooler food, lighter food.

This is that! Also featuring noodles. I wanted to make a lunch-type salad with a super savory soy-based dressing, tons of crunchy veggies, and noodles, full stop. I went vegetarian on this version but you could definitely add some leftover cooked chicken, and the veggies you use can be mixed up every time you make this based on what you have in the fridge and based on what your preferences are.

I MAINLY wanted to make this because I ordered a whole heap of these ramen noodles on Amazon that came highly recommended AND THEY WERE SO GOOD with exactly one exception: they do not store well at all with no exception. I made this mid-day and it was so good, the noodles were the perfect texture, and by evening when we had this for dinner they were mushy and kind of dissolved in our mouths as we ate, not cute at all. So, while I DO recommend these noodles because that's just how certain noodles behave and the flavor was excellent, I'd say to make this right when you'd like to serve or use a noodle like spaghetti as a substitute which would be equally delicious.

The dressing is the real star here, use any noodle you want, seriously.

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