Eat What Grows Garden Salad (or omelette)

Gluten-free. Vegetarian.

There's nothing quite like foraging around in your own garden and emerging with a bowl full of greens, herbs, and veggies for a healthy meal. Try some of these tasty combos or make your own. With garden fresh goods, it's hard to go wrong.

Note: Tender greens don’t need to be soaked and massaged  like tougher more fibrous plants like kale. If you are partial to kale salad, make sure you marinate and massage the greens thoroughly with an acid & oil combination like one of the dressings here to help you digest it.

Ingredients

As my friend Kristina would say, whatever isn’t nailed down in the garden.

Some options that can all be eaten raw include:

• baby spinach

• oak leaf lettuce

• lemon sorrel

• mesclun 

• peas and snap peas 

• radishes  (roots and tender young tops

Some nuts or seeds for protein and texture. Try:

• sunflower, pumpkin, or hemp seeds

• almond slivers or chopped walnuts

• crushed cacao beans or Brazil nuts 

Whatever you like for dressing. Keep it simple. Make sure you use both an acid and a fat to help you break down and absorb all that green goodness. Here’s some good combinations:

• olive oil & lemon juice with salt, pepper & oregano

• sunflower oil & apple cider vinegar with salt, pepper, cumin & coriander

• sesame oil & orange juice with salt, pepper, ginger & turmeric

• walnut oil & raspberry vinegar with salt, pepper, parsley, and feta cheese

Utensils

• Clean soft towel

• Big bowl, fork, and spoon (That’s all. It’s just a salad!)

Directions

• Rinse your salad ingredients and spread them out on a clean soft towel to dry.

• Put all of your dressing ingredients in the big bowl. 2-3 Tbsp o dressing is enough for even a very large salad, less for a smaller one. Mix well with a fork and let them harmonize for at least 10 minutes. 

• Toss your greens and veggies into the big bowl and mix with the dressing. Add the seeds, nuts, and/or cacao--and anything else you have on hand. A few olives. Some grated Pecorino. Dried cranberries if you’re into that. Personally, I never liked sweet stuff in my salad, maybe because in my Italian-American family, a salad started with salami. But this is your salad,not my Uncle Frankie’s. Add whatever you like.

• Let everything marinate for 10 minutes or so, then mangia.

Serving Suggestion

Round out your salad with a delicious bowl of Tomato Basil Soup and a side of Corn Arepas.

Option

Instead of a salad, sautee all your ingredients with a little garlic and fold into a delicious garden omelette!

photo credit Stephanie Wiedenhoeft

Sueño de Vida is a regenerative cacao farm and reforestation mission in Ecuador. Sueño de Vida works to educate and inspire everyday people about permaculture, sustainable living, environmental activism, and healthy living all in the name of living more in harmony with nature to create a better world for us all.

You can support the Sueño de Vida mission today by purchasing our cacao or contributing to direct reforestation.

Thank you.