One healthy choice for breakfast, lunch, or dinner is a salad and the grocery store has tons of ways to jazz it up.
Salads are a food choice that spans a wide range of colors, textures, and nutrition. There’s nothing wrong with relying on them, meal-after-meal, and yet getting in a rut with what’s in your salad can make it more-or-less boring. So, let’s explore how to jazz them up with some ingredients from your everyday grocery store.
Find Salad Ingredients at the Grocery Store and Then Try Them All
Fresh Produce
- All varieties of triple-washed greens such as spinach, baby kale, arugula, and mixtures with beet greens, baby chard, and other yummy plants
- Shredded broccoli slaw, washed and shredded green cabbage slaw, or shredded carrots
- Crunch textures such as radishes, radicchio, purple cabbage, yellow Bell peppers, and fennel
- Creamy texture such as an avocado
- Fresh herbs such as parsley, dill, mint, and cilantro
- Fresh fruit such as apple slices, orange segments, grapes, or pomegranate seeds
Canned and Frozen Produce
- Green or ripe-black olives or pickled vegetables from a jar
- Black beans, chickpeas, canned-cooked lentils, or kidney beans
- Sliced or diced canned beets or artichoke hearts
- Hearts of palm
- Frozen vegetables, steamed and cooled, such as green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, green peas, and edamame-soybeans
Dried Produce
- Dried fruits such as raisins and dried cranberries
- Dried cherries, blueberries, apricots, plums-prunes, and figs
- Dried vegetables such as crunchy textured seaweed in the International foods aisle or sun-dried tomatoes
Center of the Store
- Nuts and seeds such as peanuts, almonds, walnuts, mixed nuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, and mixtures of nuts and seeds
- Canned fish such as canned tuna, salmon, sardines, mackerel or herring
Dairy and Eggs
- Cheese that’s grated, shredded, or crumbled. Don’t miss the crumbles of feta cheese, for example, with added dried herbs and dried tomatoes
- Plain Greek yogurt and 1% cottage cheese
- Hardboiled eggs
Make Your Dressing, It’s Easy
A salad bowl of brilliant colors and nutrition is step one and the salad dressing is step two. It’s not hard to make a delicious dressing with few ingredients. You can make enough for one salad, four salads or an entire week of salads. When you make a simple, homemade dressing then your salad’s flavors will truly sing! In an earlier blog, I described 3 easy-to-make salad dressings and you’ll find them here.
Make It Healthy and Give it a Wow-Factor
Romaine lettuce and triple-washed mixed salad greens are healthy, yes. But alone, without toppings, a salad with a single ingredient is definitely lacking in nutrition potential and a wow-factor. So, go one step further and layer on some toppings. They can be just about anything that adds a depth of nutrients like fiber, vitamins, and specific antioxidants. Next time, consider a jazzed-up salad with some colorful carrots, radishes, and chopped purple cabbage, or canned artichoke hearts, olives, and a chopped apple, or cottage cheese, canned sardines, sun-dried tomatoes, and raisins. For more new ideas that will bring good nutrition to your kitchen, grab my free Mediterranean Menus.