Fresh Easy Salads You Can Whip Up in Minutes
It’s empowering to make your own food, and no more so than salads. Super-nutritious and much cheaper than plastic bagged salads, with more variety too!
Oh She Glows Salads is a wonderful guide to create your own protein-backed salad recipes, for each season. No more tasteless plastic bags of salad from the supermarket, with this book you can make your own with healthy ingredients, to store in the fridge.
From refreshing spring and summer bowls to cosy hearty salads for autumn and winter, you’ll soon discover favourites to enjoy again and again.
Before cooking, read up on food safety for people and pets (many foods are unsafe near animal friends). Bin allium scraps (onion, leeks, garlic, shallots, chives) and citrus/tomato/rhubarb scraps, as acids could harm compost creatures. It’s okay to put them in food waste bins (made into biogas).
Before recycling cans, rinse then remove lids (pop ring-pulls over holes). Then use your fingers/thumb to ‘pinch’ inner rims together, to avoid wildlife getting trapped.
Recipes include:
- Glow Up Pesto Dream Bowl
- Roasted Chickpea and Parm Romaine Crunch Salad
- The Ultimate Ranch Barbecue Tofu Cobb Salad
- Roasted Mediterranean Lentil Salad
- Autumn Crunch Farro Kale Salad
Plus the book has plant-based protein toppers, creamy dressings, vibrant vinaigrettes and savoury cheeses to create restaurant-worthy salads at home.
Angela is one of the world’s best-selling vegan cookbook authors, and author of many recipe books. She lives with her family in Canada.
Tomato & Artichoke Salad (with chickpeas)
This Tomato & Artichoke Salad with Chickpeas (Short Girl, Tall Order) is a refreshing summer lunch recipe, making use of fresh tomatoes and canned artichoke hearts, along with tinned chickpeas for protein and calcium.
Homemade Vegetable Salad (with garlic)
This homemade vegetable salad with garlic (The Simple Veganista) combines cucumber, peppers, tomatoes, onion and garlic, in a homemade lemon Dijon mustard oil dressing.
Homemade Fruity Salad Dressing Recipes
Virgin Olive oil is better for salad dressings health-wise than for cooking (rapeseed oil is better). Some people say we should not eat oil at all (and get all fat from real foods – i.e olives over olive oil). There are debates.
Try these fruity salad dressings (The Veg Space) including raspberry vinaigrette.
Watercress is not the most popular salad leaf in England, but it should be. Because it’s tasty, packed with nutrition and most of it grows in Hampshire. If you’re a local food champion, watercress is your man!
Peppery watercress is Hampshire’s best-sold crop, easily cooked, so only add at in the last few minutes for recipes. Also popular in Dorset, it was first eaten by the Romans in the first sandwich! Try this 15-minute watercress soup (Salted Mint).
If growing your own, use no-dig methods to protect wildlife (also read about pet-friendly gardens).
One bag of watercress is sold each second in England. It’s been popular since Roman times, when it was thought to cure everything from baldness to insanity! Or just to freshen breath.
Best enjoyed from April to September, choose strong green leaves for freshness and only wash and shake dry before use. Store in the fridge (ideally in water) and eat within a couple of days.
A former watercress farm near Chichester, is set to become a glamping site. The owners plan to let tourists help themselves, and remaining beds will be turned into wildlife ponds.
Free Watercress on the NHS?
The founder of England’s largest watercress farm eats it each day, as does his family. He’s so passionate about the crop, he arranges a watercress festival in the village of Alresford.
The company is also trialling ‘free watercress soup’ at an NHS hospital,. This could use up 90,000kg of winter watercress that would otherwise go to waste, and serve nutritious tasty food to patients.
M & S recently sold a ‘posh egg cress sandwich’ for £6 with ‘whole sliced egg, fresh baby watercress and mayo on two slices of bread’. It did not take long for comments like ”this country is finished’ and that ‘the word posh costs you 3 quid’.
Why does Hampshire grow so much watercress?
The county has the right mix of water, ground and weather. Watercress grows best in cool and clean water, and the chalk ground and spring-fed streams make for ideal conditions.
Chalk is a natural water filter, so that means cleaner beds and healthier crops. The mild weather helps too. The Mid Hants railway became so closely linked to the trade, that the route was called the Watercress Line!
