Salad
1275 recipes found
Orzo Salad With Lentils and Zucchini
The key to vibrant yet substantial summer salads is to mix raw and cooked ingredients and incorporate as many textures as possible. This one achieves that abundance in a streamlined manner by cooking lentils and orzo together in one pot. Start with the lentils, then add the orzo partway through cooking so both become tender at once. (You can do the same with any boiling ingredients.) The chewy orzo and velvety lentils then meet crisp, raw zucchini, crunchy nuts, and the pep of pickled peppers, scallions, lemon and a whole lot of fresh herbs — none of which requires more than a little chopping from you. Eat this protein-rich salad on its own, or add soft-boiled eggs, tinned fish, feta or pecorino, as you wish.
Chickpea Salad With Fresh Herbs and Scallions
A lighter, easier take on classic American potato salad, this version uses canned chickpeas in place of potatoes and favors Greek yogurt over mayonnaise. The trick to achieving the creamy texture of traditional potato salad is to mash some of the chickpeas lightly with a fork. It travels well, so it deserves a spot at your next picnic or desk lunch.
Tomato Salad With Chickpeas and Feta
Peak summer eating doesn’t get much easier than this fresh tomato salad. Ripe, in-season tomatoes are best, but if they are not in their prime, the simple technique of salting them first will draw out maximum flavor. Roasted nuts and seeds are excellent pantry items and make a perfect no-cook, savory-sweet crisp topping. The nut-seed-spice mixture is completely flexible; use what you have on hand, and add aromatic seeds like nigella or fennel if you like. The store-bought granola is optional, but it adds a surprising sweetness and even more crunch. (Opt for one that is as plain as possible and without dried fruits or chocolate.) Make extra topping and keep it in an airtight jar for sprinkling over salads and roasted vegetables. To get vegetarian recipes like this one delivered to your inbox, sign up for The Veggie newsletter.
Sardine Salad
For a vivid take on lunchtime tuna salad, use oil-rich sardines and skip the mayonnaise. Emulsifying the deeply seasoned oil from the sardine tin with lemon juice and mustard makes the salad creamy like mayonnaise does but with flavors that are more intense and pronounced. Add any of the sharp, crunchy, fresh pops you like in your tuna or whitefish salad, such as capers, cornichons, pickled peppers or herbs, and eat this sardine salad over greens, on a bagel or English muffin, or between two slices of toast.
Chickpea Salad With Gim
The salty, nutty and gloriously savory flavors of gim — the Korean roasted and seasoned seaweed — anchor this easy chickpea salad. Packed with umami, sheets of crisp gim are finely chopped into onyx-black confetti, speckling the sesame oil and mayonnaise-bound chickpeas. (Note that Japanese nori, the unseasoned sheets of seaweed used for sushi, are too dry and will not work in this recipe.) As it sits, the salad absorbs the dressing and the raw red onion mellows out beautifully, which means this is an ideal contender for making ahead and lugging to picnics whenever.
Classic Bean Salad
You can use any kind or combination of canned beans to make this classic picnic salad, but a mix of white beans, chickpeas and red kidney beans makes it especially colorful. Although this is delicious when freshly made, it gets even better as it sits. If you have time, make it at least an hour or two before serving; it can rest at room temperature for up to 4 hours — but after that, slip it into the fridge. If you want to make this the day before, add the celery and parsley just before serving, so they stay crisp and green.
Classic Caprese Salad
This classic summer dish doesn’t get any simpler or more delicious. Use different-colored heirloom tomatoes for the prettiest salad, and buffalo milk mozzarella for the best tasting one.
Harissa-Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Red Onion
This simple salad is powered by two naturally sweet vegetables – sweet potato and red onion – but harissa, the popular north African spice paste, balances everything out. Harissa adds more than just a subtle heat to a dish; it injects smokiness, tang, richness and overall intrigue. When shopping, look for harissa that has a deep, brick-red color, a thick consistency and dried red chiles listed as one of the first ingredients. Cutting the sweet potatoes into wedges creates sharp edges so that they get crispy and golden in the oven. This dish is easily adaptable, and simple to make into a complete meal by adding roasted chickpeas, cooked lentils or grilled radicchio.
Green Bean Salad With Hot Mustard Dressing
Hot mustard powder brings a sharp, spicy twist to traditional mustard vinaigrette, which complements sweet green beans well. The beans are blanched until crisp-tender, then tossed in the vinaigrette while still hot. As the beans cool, they absorb all the flavors of mild shallot, fragrant garlic, tangy rice vinegar and hot mustard. Rich, roasted pecans add nutty sweetness to balance the spicy dressing. Though the salad can be made a few hours ahead, you’ll want to top it with the nuts right before serving to preserve their crunch. The beans themselves can be served at room temperature or chilled.
Green Bean, Artichoke and Radicchio Salad
Snappy cooked green beans make for a gorgeous salad with radicchio and canned artichokes. Beyond the vegetables, all you need for this refreshing zinger of a side dish is a generous glug of olive oil, a heavy hand with salt and pepper, and an electric spritz of lemon. A sprinkle of dried oregano on top lends bottled Italian dressing vibes, but with a homemade taste. This is an excellent addition to Thanksgiving, as it lets you feed two birds with one scone: You get a green bean moment and a salad moment all at once. To prepare this in advance, assemble everything through Step 2, keep it covered in the refrigerator, then on Thanksgiving Day, proceed with the dressing.
Kale and Squash Salad With Almond-Butter Vinaigrette
For a creamy, rich and dairy-free salad dressing, use almond butter instead of olive oil. It provides rich savoriness and body, like mild tahini or peanut butter. In this recipe, mix it with lemon and mustard to dress a combination of sturdy greens, roasted squash and crisp apples. Embellish as you wish by adding salty cheese, like blue, Gruyère or pecorino; freshness with fennel, parsley, mint or pomegranate seeds; or heft with whole grains or beans. This hearty salad is easy to tote to work for lunch and exciting enough for dinner.
Pressure Cooker Pork With Citrus and Mint
In this recipe for a Thai-inspired salad, made for a 6- to 8-quart electric pressure cooker, crispy pork, flavored with fish sauce and lime, is paired with sweet and juicy pomelo (or use grapefruit) and heady fried garlic chips. If you’d rather make this in a slow cooker, you can; it'll take 5 to 7 hours on high. (You can also make it in a stovetop pressure cooker, by trimming a few minutes off the cooking time. The stovetop versions tend to operate at a slightly higher pressure, cooking food more quickly.)
Grilled Broccoli and Lemon With Chile and Garlic
Alongside piles of roasted eggplant, the charred broccoli salad has become somewhat of a mascot on the salad display at Ottolenghi restaurants and delis throughout London. So much so, in fact, that it can’t be removed from the menu, let alone tampered with. But here, the favorite is played with: Charred lemons and anchovies, savory with umami, add sourness and funk. Serve this alongside your protein of choice, or as part of an al fresco spread.
Grilled Corn, Asparagus and Spring Onion Salad
In this cookout perfect salad, corn, asparagus and spring onions benefit from the deep flavors of the grill. Their outer layers get a rustic char, their full sweetness is released, and they go from raw to cooked while maintaining a crunchy bite. Still warm, they’re doused in one of Mexico’s most fun ways to dress grilled vegetables or potato chips, an easy-to-eat sauce where umami, citrus and heat converge. The mixture is typically referred to as salsa preparada, meaning you simply mix these sauces together to “prepare” your food. You may wonder if the soy, Worcestershire and Maggi sauces compete, but each has a different character of sazón, which is whisked with plenty of fresh squeezed lime juice and a punch of chile oil. If more heat is desired, you can add a splash of your favorite hot sauce. This salad is great solo as an appetizer, but it is even better served right next to grilled meats.
Grilled Salmon Salad With Lime, Chiles and Herbs
Made of soft, supple salmon; crisp lettuces and vegetables; and a very savory dressing run through with chiles and lime, this light salad is tangy and full of flavor. The dressing, based on nuoc cham, a traditional Vietnamese dipping sauce, has just enough fish sauce to give it depth and pungency without overpowering the brightness of the lime. You can substitute other fish, or even chicken, for the salmon. Just adjust the grilling time as needed, and toss with the dressing while still warm. Note that if you don’t have a grill, you can roast the fish in the oven.
Shrimp and Avocado Salad With Citrus Vinaigrette (Camarones a la Vinagreta)
Versions of seafood “coctel” are found around the Caribbean, usually with ketchup as a base for the sauce. In this recipe adapted from Von Diaz's “Coconuts and Collards” cookbook, the tomato and onion are part of the salad, and the dressing is based on citrus and olive oil, plus a bit of mustard to make it creamy. It’s a refreshing and satisfying dish for hot weather, perfect with a cold beer at the end of a long summer day. Diced avocado makes the dish more filling, but it is optional.
Zucchini Salad
This exquisitely simple recipe from Jacques Pépin first appeared in The Times in 1991, and couldn't be easier. The zucchini is gently roasted until tender, then tossed with salt, pepper, white wine vinegar and oil. It's the perfect treatment for almost any summer squash.
Marinated Zucchini Salad
Raw zucchini can be a dull ingredient, but when it’s very thinly sliced it marinates beautifully, especially in lemon juice. I like to use a mixture of green and yellow squash here. Assemble this dish at least four hours before you wish to serve it, so that the squash has time to soften and soak up the lemony marinade.
Marinated Zucchini With Farro, Chickpeas and Parmesan
Zucchini’s a tricky vegetable, prone to mushiness. Here, we avoid those pitfalls: By pan-frying planks, you’ll get tender, rich insides with golden-brown exteriors. And when you pair these cooked pieces with delicate raw zucchini ribbons (don’t call them zoodles!) you’ll get just a glimpse of this vegetable’s full potential. A generous handful of arugula, and a bed of farro and chickpeas, fill out the rest of the meal. Cooking the chickpeas along with the farro may seem strange, but it will make the canned beans softer, creamier, and more flavorful than simply dumping them into the salad. For added crunch and flavor in every bite, roughly chop the zucchini noodles and the planks before tossing.
Zucchini-and-Fennel Salad With Pecorino and Mint
In 2007, if you were looking for a sign of the culinary times, you could do no better than the one prominently displayed in San Francisco, in my local Übermarket for the conscientious shopper: “Organic Summer Squash, $3.99 a pound.” Our growing food fetishization created a new produce category: luxury squash. I was disturbed but also intrigued: perhaps familiarity had blinded me to squash’s delicate charms — at these prices it clearly deserved more than a typically bland sauté or a quick turn on the grill. Given its etymology (the word “squash” comes from a Native American word meaning “eaten raw”), maybe it shouldn’t be cooked at all. So I swallowed hard, bought some zucchini and shaved them into a salad with fennel, mint and pecorino, which made a delicious and interesting starter.
Zucchini Panzanella
Zucchini shines in this take on panzanella, a Tuscan bread salad commonly featuring tomatoes. (Panzanella didn’t include tomatoes until the 16th century, and earlier versions featured onions as the main vegetable.) Here, scallions crisp up alongside the pan-fried croutons, which get a last-minute candying with maple syrup to provide extra crunch and insurance against sogginess. While the croutons are magnificent and dangerously snackable, the star of this salad is the zucchini. Cooked zucchini tastes wonderful, but the crunch of the raw vegetable in this recipe is stimulating and sweet, especially when doused with the punchy, garlicky dressing. To get vegetarian recipes like this one delivered to your inbox, sign up for The Veggie newsletter .
Brown Butter Lentil and Sweet Potato Salad
This simple lentil salad has a little secret: a toasty, brown butter vinaigrette perfumed with sage. The dish has as much texture as it does flavor. French green lentils or black lentils are the ideal choice, as they hold their shape well after cooking, but brown lentils will work too, though they’ll be a bit softer. Start testing your lentils for doneness after about 15 minutes of cooking; you want them cooked through but not mushy, and they’re best if they retain some bite. Roasted until tender, the sweet potatoes add richness, but feel free to substitute just about any roasted vegetables. Carrots, beets or red bell peppers would all be delicious in their stead.
Smoky Eggplant Spread
Essentially a delightful eggplant schmear to eat with warm pita triangles, this spread, similar to baba ghanouj, gets its pleasant smoky flavor from a deliberate charring of the eggplant skin. Whether over hot coals or under the broiler, the eggplant must be mercilessly blackened (the inner sweet flesh gets steamed to softness in the process). Tahini, olive oil, cumin, lemon and hot pepper take care of the rest.
Tomato Salad With Smoky Eggplant Flatbread
Buy lavash or pita at a local Middle Eastern market, heat the flatbreads in a skillet or toaster oven, and smear them with this delicious eggplant spread, enriched with spices and tahini and pleasantly smoky from a cook over an open flame. Serve the flatbreads with this Turkish-style tomato salad, a variation on one I learned in Istanbul from the Turkish chef Gamze Ineceli. Hers is more traditional — finely chopped tomato is customary — but you can also choose the colorful cherry tomatoes at the market and cut them in halves or quarters.