You can see from my photo above that I take my salad making very seriously! Ha, ha! If I were to make a salad for myself (just one portion for lunch for example), I would never bother to wash, dry, and chop such a variety of vegetables, but I make what I am calling "Assembly Line Salads". If I am making 4 to 6 salads all at one time, it is totally worth the effort to wash, dry, and chop a lot of ingredients. I usually make up these salads on the day I do my grocery shopping.
For these salads, which are all identical, I used the following ingredients:
1 bag of Kroger "Tender Spinach" (comes triple washed/ready to eat)
1 can of Kroger garbanzo beans, rinsed/drained/spread out on a paper towel to dry
1 small container of grape tomatoes
1 small container of sugar snap peas
1 red bell pepper, diced
2 carrots, diced or grated
about 3/4 cup of finely chopped red cabbage
1 small cucumber, chopped (this is an Armenian cucumber from my neighbor's garden)
My salads vary just a bit each time I make them. I love a prepackaged/prewashed salad from Walmart which contains a blend of baby kale and spinach, but really use all kinds of greens for the base. Then I just divide up the ingredients among the containers so my salads are ready. I often add chopped hard boiled egg to my salads. I guess the most important tip I have it to not place any very wet ingredient in the salads or they will spoil more quickly. This is why I use grape or cherry tomatoes instead of diced tomato as an example.
My "go to salad dressing" has been a homemade Balsamic Vinaigrette. You can find the recipe HERE. But I do love to try new dressings. I was resistant to make salad dressing at home for awhile. The big draw back is that sometimes the salad dressings gets "gloopy" in the refrigerator as a result of the oil solidifying. When this happens, I shake the dressing like mad and then measure out about 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons of dressing and then microwave it for about 5 seconds on high. Works like a charm. Of course, if you prefer, you can let your salad dressing sit out at room temperature for awhile and the oil in the dressing will become less "gloopy" as the oil warms up.
The dressing I am using this week is called "Tangy Dressing". I found it on Facebook and I took a screen shot of the recipe so I only know the ingredients, but not the source of the recipe. Sorry! It looks like it's a dressing for a broccoli salad with apple, walnuts, carrots, goji or cranberries, and a little red onion. Sounds amazing! I am using the dressing on my veggie salads and I really like it. The recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of crushed red pepper flakes; that had me a bit worried... that sounds mighty spicy. I just used a few pinches of crushed red pepper flakes. In addition, I used dried parsley in place of fresh parsley since I did not have any on hand.
Next time you are having a salad at home or buying salad dressing at the store, look at the ingredients in pre-made salad dressing and see how many ingredients are in there. You might wonder what some of the ingredients are. For the homemade "Tangy Dressing", I had all of the ingredients on hand and I love that there are no weird additives. My diet is far from perfect, but making salad dressings at home is a change I feel really good about.
*** I used just a few pinches of crushed red pepper flakes; 2 teaspoons sounds like a LOT! Also, I used dried parsley (about 1 teaspoon or less) instead of fresh since dried is what I had on hand.
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