Simple Salad

Simple Salad

It’s summer and it’s a great time of year to enjoy a healthy simple salad.

Do you find salad boring? It doesn’t have to be a boring combination of iceberg lettuce, tomato and cucumber! You can have anything you like in a salad.

Here’s an idea for a simple salad that is brimming with goodness, has plenty colour, a great mouthfeel and bucket loads of taste.

Ingredients

You can use any combination of ingredients that work for you. In our simple salad we’ve used:

• Mixed leaves
• Cherry tomatoes
• Steamed beetroot
• Radishes
• A small avocado
• Onions roasted with a little cooking spray
• Red and yellow peppers roasted with a little cooking spray
• Courgettes roasted with a little cooking spray
• Chicken breast, sprinkled with tandoori spice mix, fried in a little cooking spray

First, just chop it as you like, put the roasted veg in the oven and fry the chicken. When the roasted veg is done just let it cool for a few minutes so it’s easier to handle. Finally, assemble it with leaves first and then everything else on top!

Tips to keep the calorie content down

A lot of people make their salads very high fat – salmon, avocado, feta cheese, nuts, seeds, olives and then an oily dressing. Even without all these fatty ingredients, an oily dressing is an easy way to double to calorie content of your salad. So, here are our tips to keep the calorie content down without sacrificing taste and mouthfeel

• Dress it with balsamic vinegar. This provides the gum-curling tang that makes the whole thing super tasty.
• Include some avocado for fat content and a creamy texture.
• Use roasted veggies for a luscious mouthfeel and flavour intensity. There’s a little fat in there too for a good balanced meal.
• If you ditch the oil you can have more food! Hit your calorie allowance with more veg in the salad or a huge bowl of berries afterwards!
• If you’d like an oil-based dressing then be aware of the other high fat ingredients.

You can put anything you like in a salad. It doesn’t have to be traditional salad vegetables and it doesn’t have to be raw. Make it up to suit your tastes. It’s all healthy stuff and, as long as you don’t overdo the fats, it’s low in calories and, nutrient dense. So, go on, rustle up a simple salad and fill your boots!

If you like this simple salad, have a look at another we posted a couple of years ago.