Salad Recipes

Simple Salad Recipes

Our easy salad recipes are perfect for lunches, summer barbecues, and dinner parties!
Healthy and delicious, each one can double as a main or side dish!

Craving fresh, healthy, delicious salads? Find vegetarian, vegan and gluten free salad recipes here.

What is a Salad

So much variety of salad ingredients exists amongst salad recipes that it is somewhat difficult to give a comprehensive definition of this class of foods.

In general, however, salads may be considered as a dish of green herbs or vegetables, sometimes cooked, and usually chopped or sliced, sometimes mixed with fruit or with cooked and chopped cold meat, fish, etc., and generally served with a dressing.

For the most part, salads take their name from their chief ingredient, as, for instance, chicken salad, tomato salad, pineapple salad, etc.

Just what place salads have in the meal depends on the salad itself?
A high-protein salad, such as crayfish salad, should take the place of the meat course. A light salad of vegetables or fruits may be used as an additional course.

Importance of Salads

Salads are often considered to be a dish of little importance; that is, something that may be left out or added to a meal without affecting it to any great extent.

While this may be the case in a meal that is composed of a sufficient variety of foods, salads have a definite place in meals as they are planned in the majority of households.

There is no more effective nor appetizing way in which to include vitamins and nutrients in a meal than in the serving of salads.
In addition, salads make a strong appeal to the appetite and at the same time are beneficial so far as the health of the family is concerned.

Salad Ingredients

One of the advantages of salads is that the ingredients from which they can be made are large in number.
In fact, almost any cooked or raw fruit or vegetable, or any meat, poultry, or fish, whether cooked expressly for this purpose or left over from a previous meal, may be used as salad ingredients.

Canned ingredients of these varieties may also be used to advantage for salads during the winter when fresh foods are unavailable.
The idea that such foods cannot be used is wrong.

As far as meats are concerned as an ingredient of salads, they are not used so extensively in salads as are fruits and vegetables.

Often, however, veal or pork may be used to increase the quantity of material needed to make certain salads, such as chicken salad.
Canned fish or fish freshly cooked makes appetizing salads, and if there is not a sufficient quantity of one kind on hand, another may be added without impairing the quality of the salad.

As has already been stated, almost any vegetable, raw, canned, or freshly cooked, can be used in the making of salads.
In addition, these vegetables may be combined in almost any way.

Small amounts of two, three, four, or more vegetables may be combined with an appetizing salad dressing and served as a luncheon or dinner salad.
If no definite recipe is followed but whatever material that happens to be on hand is utilized, the result is not only an appetizing salad, but a saving of vegetables that might otherwise be wasted.

Fruits, both canned and raw, are largely used in the making of salads. As with vegetables, almost any combination of them makes a delicious salad when served with the proper dressing.
Thus, a slice of pineapple, a canned peach or two, or a few spoonfuls of cherries may be added to grapefruit, oranges, bananas, or whatever fruit is available and served with the salad dressing that is preferred.

Vegetables are seldom used with fruits, celery being the only one that is ever used in this way.

On the other hand, nuts are often used with fruits, vegetables, meats, poultry and fish in the making of salads and any variety may be utilised.

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