Salad Every Day

Salads can be a easy way to introduce more vegetables into your day because what matters most is sourcing and selecting fresh, seasonal ingredients. After that, all that's left is to assemble them in a bowl and decide which delicious dressing to make in the 5 minutes before sitting down.

The variety of salads you can make is endless so you'll never get bored. You can try different veggies depending on the season to keep it interesting. And every salad can be a winner driven merely by your imagination and the availability of ingredients where you live and shop.

Buy Fresh Fruits and Vegetables

Because you'll be eating raw vegetables and fruits, buying fresh, good quality ingredients is really the whole game. Fruits and vegetables require specific types and amounts of soil, sun, water and time to grow and ripen with full flavor and nutrients. Different varieties thrive in different climates, in different parts of the world at different times of the year. And, until around the 1950's, most people ate the fruits and vegetables that grew where they lived in the seasons in which they grew.

But with advances in transportation and storage technologies, global trade, greenhouse and hydroponic farming, and agricultural breeding and genetic modifications of food from the 1950's forward, the system changed and led to the rise of the supermarket- a concept bred to appeal to a culture that was pressed for time and encouraged to eat for "convenience."

The challenge with this uber-efficient system is that its priorities are volume, constant availability, and economies of scale - not freshness, flavor or nutrition. Fruit and vegetables are shipped over long distances in refrigerated trucks, stored and treated with chemicals in climate-controlled warehouses to delay ripening and spoilage. These maneuvers affect the taste of fruits and vegetables because they are picked before they are ripe and never go through their natural chemical changes that deliver their sweetness. While they appear fully ripe, their flavor can be anything but.

Jump to:

• Buy Fresh Fruits and Vegetables
• Eat a Diverse Set of Foods for Optimal Health
• Farmer's Markets
• How to Find a Farmer's Market in Your Area
• The Salad Basics
• Ingredients
• Instructions to Make a Basic Chopped Salad
• Tips to Make this Salad
• Equipment
• Every Salad Can Be Different
• Related
• Consider This

Eat a Diverse Set of Foods for Optimal Health

One other thing to note. You might notice that the grocery store produce section offers a set selection of fruits and vegetables - the same ones all the time. One of the best things you can do to support healthy digestion is eat a diet filled with a large variety of different foods.

According to Stanford Medicine, "Eating a diverse set of foods is crucial for a healthy microbiome because different types of bacteria within your gut thrive on different nutrients found in various foods, leading to a greater diversity of microbes, which is considered essential for optimal gut health and overall wellbeing; a diverse microbiome is better equipped to handle various digestive tasks and may be linked to reduced risk of chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes." 

Where can you find a broader variety of seasonal, fresh, flavorful and nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables? It's not the supermarket. The best place to buy a wide variety of fruits and vegetables is the local Farmer's Market or a local family farm.

Farmer's Markets

I've been curious and adventurous about food for as long as I can remember, even though I was raised on all the traditional junk food, fast food, and "conveniences" made available over the last many years. But, as you can see from the title of the blog, I've always sought out the colorful foods - and the best of those can be found at Farmers Markets and farms.

What is a Farmers Market? It's a public and recurring market composed of farmers or their representatives selling the foods that they grow directly to you, the consumer. When you purchase food at the Farmers Market, the farmers receive more of your food dollars, you get the freshest and most flavorful food in the area, and local economies prosper.

How to Find a Farmer's Market in Your Area

To find the Farmers Markets in your area, the easiest way I've found is do an online search for a Farmers Market near (your address, city or zip code). You could also consult the Local Food Directory published by the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service, but I didn't find it that helpful as it was missing a lot of details.

There is so much more to say about Farmers Markets and buying, storing and preparing fresh fruits and vegetables, but for now, let's make a salad. This topic will be expanded in many more posts on the site.

The Salad Basics

Salads are a perfect dish for eating all the colors. The colorful hues of fruits and vegetables make it easy to create beautiful salads. Two other things to consider include:

1. Texture. Select ingredients so your salad has the right amount of crunch, but not too much, and offers a few bites that are softer, milder, spicier, or more zesty.
2. How you cut your ingredients. For this salad, I've chosen to cut the vegetables into very small dice. The colors fall into place beautifully, the resulting salad offers the perfect crunch, and it's fun and easy to make.

Ingredients

This is a salad prepared in the summer here in California with local, seasonal ingredients bought at the Farmers Market as just one example.

To make this salad, you'll need:

• Lettuce: For this salad, I used little gem lettuces, which look like miniature romaine lettuce heads. The outer green leaves are more leafy and the inner leaves are light, crunchy, and hold their shape when chopped. There are so many other kinds of lettuce though and all have unique characteristics. Red leaf and green leaf lettuce are more leafy, less crunchy. Mesclun lettuces are leafy and look more like actual leaves. There are also heirloom lettuces that come in beautiful shades of green and deep maroons. Try a different lettuce next time you make a salad to expand you options.
• Other greens: Bitter greens are great for digestion. Try to include some arugula, radicchio, or spicy dandelion greens in your next salad.
• Cucumbers: I include cucumbers in my salad as often as I can. For this salad, I used Persian cucumbers, but also love Armenian cucumbers when they grow in the summer and English cucumbers. You can eat the skin and seeds of these cucumbers, which makes them perfect for salads.
• Red onions: Red onions lend the salad a sweetness and a little bite. And color of course.
• Radishes: There are so many varieties of radishes. They are a perfect crunchy snack to eat while you're preparing your salad, and the perfect crunch for a salad like this chopped one. Try watermelon radishes in the winter, korean radishes, green luobo radishes or butter radishes in the summer.
• Carrots: I munch on carrots all the time. It's my favorite crunchy snack. Make sure to buy fresh carrots from a farmer's market or a farmstand to get the sweetest ones. Often the ones at the supermarket are old and have lost their sweetness.
• Tomatoes of all colors: Tomatoes need heat and a lot of sunlight to grow sweet. That's why they only grow in the summer. There aren't enough hours of sunlight for them to grow in the winter months. Therefore - only eat and enjoy tomatoes in the summer. Trust me.
• Olives (optional): I like an olive or two in my salads because they add a surprise bit of salience to a bite of salad but you never know which bite it will be in!
• Avocado (optional): I love avocados with salads because they add a creaminess to salads that are crunchy and served with acidic dressings. However, I think a few slices of avocado are better served on the side so you can add them to whichever bites you choose. If you mix pieces of avocado into your salad, the avocado will break down from the acid in the dressing and the texture and flavor will disappear, as if you didn't have it at all.

See recipe card for quantities.

Instructions to Make a Basic Chopped Salad

Tips to Make this Salad

1. Lay out and wash all ingredients before you start making your salad. This makes preparation and clean up so much easier.
2. Cut vegetables into evenly sized pieces. This makes the salad easier to eat and, when dressed, will keep all ingredients coated evenly.
3. Layer vegetables in your bowl one at a time. This way you can manage how much of each vegetable you want and edit along the way. It's also fun to construct a salad this way because it's like an art project, adding ingredients by color, and in the process making the salad both beautiful and delicious.
4. Add a delicious homemade herby citrus dressing - free of chemicals and full of flavor.

Equipment

1. Chef's Knife. You'll want to work with a good sharp chef's knife to chop vegetables. This one is a good mid-priced example of a chef's knife to consider. You'll want to brush up on your knife skills as well.
2. Cutting board. To protect your counters and your knife, you'll want to chop your vegetables on a proper cutting board. There a many varieties to choose from and many opinions on which is the best. One option is a wooden board like this one. Wood cutting boards do require a bit of maintenance though, so make sure to review the manufacturer's instructions. Another option is plastic like this one which offers a great value and is easy to use, wash and store.
3. Wooden salad bowl. A good quality wooden salad bowl is a beautiful and practical receptacle for a salad. The best are made of woods such as cherry, maple, walnut, beech or olive because they're durable and have a natural resistance to moisture. My experience has been that it's easier to buy from a company that specializes in turning wood bowls, like this one versus a distributor or retail outlet that may not know the details about how the bowl was made.

Every Salad Can Be Different

There are so many variations to a salad, the possibilties are actually endless. This "recipe" is only meant as inspiration. Now, let's make a salad!

Related

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Consider This

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