Basic Easy Salad Recipe

Vegetables are an absolute essential when it comes to a healthy diet, nobody can go wrong when it comes to eating a nice salad with a variety of veggies. It's also important to have some raw foods in your diet, and salads are a great space to make sure you're eating some raw veggies. Eating raw veggies has an amazing way of making your whole body feel clean, from cleaning your teeth as you chew them, to the added water they bring to your body, to the way the fiber helps flush out your waste. Raw veggies at the quintessential raw food.

I like to make big salads as part of a meal prep at the beginning of the week and keep it in the fridge for 4-5 days during the week. Salads are extremely versatile, there are a few rules of thumb I follow when making a lovely, healthy salad.

My Important Rules of Thumb When Making a Delicious Salad

First, to break from tradition, I tend to avoid using leafy greens. Using tender, leafy greens makes the salad wilt in no time. When I make a salad, I like to make a huge one that I can keep in the fridge for 4-5 days. Using leafy greens don't really keep for more than a day in a salad. 

Second, I love to use a variety of beautiful colors in my salads. Having a variety of colors tends to provide the greatest variety of nutrients, creating a beautiful and well-rounded dish. 

Third, I like to add an extra something for some interesting flavor and texture such as nuts, beans, seeds, etc. It helps make the salad more interesting than having it be 100% vegetables. 

Fourth, personally I love to use very simple dressing - usually just some olive oil and lemon juice and/or vinegar. It's important to consume your veggies with some fat because the fat is what helps your body absorb the nutrition from your veggies. I love the flavor of the lemon juice and vinegar. Adding only these ingredients also cuts way down on the sodium levels in your salad that you may get from a traditional store-bought dressing. Maintaining a low sodium intake helps make sure you keep your water retention down, making you look slimmer. 

So here is an example of a salad I made recently. Hope you get some inspiration from this sample!

From this group of veggies I used

1 cucumber

1/2 yellow bell pepper

1/2 red bell pepper

1/2 green bell pepper

1 tomato

1/2 carrot

1 stock of celery

1/4 cup of sunflower seeds

1 tablespoon of olive oil

2 tablespoons of lemon juice. 

As you can see, I simply chopped these veggies up, threw them in a bowl and tossed them together with lemon juice, oil, and sunflower seeds.

These salads are perfect for a side with your lunch or dinner, especially as the warmer months are approaching.