Salads for People With Produce But No Patience

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This is a collection of salads made from actual things people grow. Or buy. Tomatoes, kale, beets, cabbage, greens. Nothing stacked, spiralized, or just a bowl of leaves.

These are not meant to impress someone on Tik Tok. Just solid salads you’ll make more than once. There's also a crouton recipe worth turning the oven on for.

Everybody thinks of salad as an easy meal. Salads aren't easy, they're painfully prep heavy. Wash the lettuce, dry it, cut the vegetables, mix together a dressing, find a fork. Honestly.

I get as much ready as I can for one salad and eat it throughout the week, because even though it's "just salad", at 8 p.m. washing and drying lettuce is as ridiculous a thought as vacuuming daily.

So take these, match them up with whatever vegetables you have in your fridge and make whatever you can in advance.

At the moment, tomatoes are just coming into season, kale is available, as well as beets and cabbage. Below you'll find a relatively easy salad for each of those ingredients.

That’s the pitch. Let’s eat salad.

Table of Contents

Easy Tomato Salad

Kale Salad

You need a grand total of 5 ingredients for this salad but there's a hitch. They need to be the best ingredients. Fresh from the vine tomatoes, a decent olive oil, a *white* balsamic vinegar, a ripe lemon and creamy goat cheese. Or just use whatever crap you have in the house - it'll be fine.

→ Get the tomato salad recipe.

For the past several years I've been eating this kale salad in the summer not because it's my favourite salad and not because I like kale. I eat it because it's easy and it's healthy.

→ Get the kale salad recipe.

Classic Coleslaw

Grilled Chicken w/ Roasted Peppers

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Traditional coleslaw in a small black bowl lined with a red cabbage leaf.

There are a LOT of things I love about this classic coleslaw recipe that my family has been making for years. It's crunchy, creamy, sweet and vinegary - all in one mouthful. Plus it'll keep in the refrigerator for dayssssss. This is not an adventurous coleslaw or an innovative one. It's better than that - it's an old timey, delicious coleslaw.

→ Get the coleslaw recipe.

Take a tip from Italians - cooking doesn't have to be complicated to be delicious. You just need fresh ingredients and the determination to use them while they're still indeed fresh.

→ Get the chicken & peppers salad recipe.

Homemade Croutons

Dry, stale, leftover bread? Turn it into golden brown cubes of crispy, buttery homemade crouton goodness. All you need is 10 minutes and a dream. Also an oven and some butter and a couple of other things ...

Pair with: Kale salad, Caesar, soup, or your bare hands.

→ Get the crouton recipe.

Curry Chicken Salad

Beet Salad

It's a bold claim, I know. But this really is a great recipe. Perhaps the best curry chicken salad recipe in the land. Chicken, apples, mayo, curry, toasted pecans, celery and raisins. I know. You don't like raisins, right? You can use cranberries if you want.

→ Get the curry chicken salad recipe.

I have, at this very moment, no less than 4 different salads in my refrigerator. They may not be assembled, but the ingredients are there, ready and waiting to be sliced, diced and ricocheted into my mouth. Today's salad: the humble beet salad.

→ Get the beet salad recipe.

Pick one. Make it. Eat it all the nights in a row until it's gone. That’s the system.