I wasn’t a big salad person until I started my garden and began making meals with fresh ingredients. Trust me, once you harvest fresh farm-to-table produce, even as little as a lettuce leaf, you will never go back to store-bought products. That brings me to a colorful plate of rainbow salad I made this week, and let me tell you, it is the best, easiest, and most flavorful recipe you will ever find.
A wonderfully tasty and easy recipe to replicate, this rainbow salad can be prepared with different ingredients and for any meal. It has a healthy helping of your choice of lentils or beans, sweet potatoes or normal potatoes, lettuce, red cabbage, pickled onions, carrots, and kale all soaked in a tangy lemon and fresh mint dressing. For this lettuce, carrots, and kale came from my own little slice of heaven and the crunch of garden-fresh produce is just the best.
The recipe calls for a lot of chopping, a little wait as some veggies get roasted, and a little bit of tossing. You can even make this as an Easter side. So let’s get into it without much ado.
Prep Time: 20 Minutes
Cook Time: 40 Minutes
Total Time: 1 Hour
Difficulty Level: Incredibly Easy
Yield: 1 Person
Note: Since I live alone, my recipe includes quantity sufficient for one person. But you can multiply that with however many people you are cooking for.
Also Read: This Leafy Salad With Lemon Mustard Dressing can be Your Favorite Weekend Lunch
Ingredients:
- 200g sweet potatoes (cubed)
- 1 quarter of red cabbage (diced)
- 2 big carrots (cut julienne)
- 200g of cooked lentils/beans of choice
- 1 onion (sliced and pickled)
- Handful of lettuce leaves
- Handful of kale
- 1 garlic clove
- 5 tablespoons of lemon juice
- Handful sprigs of fresh mint
- 1 tablespoon of mustard
- Extra virgin olive oil
- Salt
- Pepper
Instructions:
- Cut and Cook Potatoes: Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Wash and cut the sweet potatoes into bite-size pieces. Put them in a bowl, add two tablespoons of olive oil, sprinkle salt and pepper to taste, and mix well. Line a baking tray with parchment paper, and evenly lay the potatoes. Bake for 30-40 minutes until golden brown and slightly crispy
- Prepare the Vegetables: While the potatoes are roasting, slice and pickle the onion. Cook the lentils (for this, you might want to soak them in hot water for a while to cut down the cooking time). Prepare the other ingredients in the meantime. Thinly dice the cabbage, cut the carrots into julienne strips, and wash and shred the lettuce and kale leaves
- Make the Dressing: Pluck the leaves off mint sprigs, chuck them inside a blender, and squeeze the juice out of 2-3 lemons (we are looking for 5 tablespoons of juice), add in the mustard and the garlic clove, add half a cup of extra virgin olive oil and blintz into a bright dressing. You can salt and pepper the dressing as per your taste
- Bring Everything Together: Once everything is ready, put the dressing at the bottom of a big bowl, dump everything on it, and toss the vegetable scooping from the bottom up to slather each bite in a juicy, tangy dressing with fresh mint
That is it. It takes hardly 20-30 minutes of work and everything comes together nice and easy. You cannot screw up this recipe even if you wanted to.
Also Read: Eggless Strawberry Cake With Lush Cream Cheese Frosting Feels Like Spring in Your Mouth
Note: This recipe is the easiest, most flavorful, and most versatile. You can add or eliminate ingredients (just not from the dressing) for it to better suit your personal preferences and tastes. You can even include fruits, dried fruits, and seeds and you will still get the flavor-packed rainbow salad that you will be coming back over and over again.
Let me know if you try this and share your results. Happy Cooking!
