salad summer
the salads i want to make this summer, plus your recommendations
Hi!
I’ve been away from this space for a little while; life just got really busy with parenting, work, and other things. But I’ve missed writing here, and I’ve especially missed talking about food, cooking, and recipes. So I’ve decided to revive this newsletter — with a focus primarily on cooking. (Perhaps a new name? But that’s a problem for future me to figure out).
While I was away, somehow, people kept finding and subscribing this newsletter even though I didn’t send a new one for a year and a half — so I want to say thank you to to those who have newly subscribed, and thank you also to those who stayed! There are now over 6,400 people reading this newsletter, which blows my mind. I have been doing this newsletter in various formats for over a decade now — I started on Tinyletter in 2014 and then moved to Substack in 2019. I’m so grateful that people enjoy reading it. So thank you!
I’m not sure yet what the cadence will be — we’ll see! I’m going to start posting and see how I feel and how many ideas I have.
This week, the thing that I really wanted to write about is: summer salads. Call it the Salad Summer, Summer of Salads (me, I’m calling it that). Once June hits, especially in that period where the temperatures start to get balmy and we haven’t yet installed our window AC units, I feel like it should be illegal to turn my oven on. And from then on, I only want to make salads.
Every week in June, my meal plan has been heavy on salads of all sorts. Grain salads, noodle salads, steak salads. My criteria for an ideal summer salad: must be heavy on vegetables — it cant just be greens; it needs to be dense with lots of chopped vegetables. And it needs to be hefty enough where the salad is the meal. These are main course, dinner salads. Not side salads where I have to figure out a protein to serve with it — that’s one more thing to cook, and I will not be turning on my oven or stove if I don’t have to!
I’ve been posting some of the salads I’ve been making over on Instagram, and last week I asked people to share their favorite summer salad recipes. Several people shared some (thank you!) but even more people asked me to post the roundup, which is difficult to do on Instagram as a platform, hence, substack was the perfect format for that.
So, without further ado, here’s that roundup! Plus, some of the salads I’ve made this summer, and what I’m planning to make this week.
Favorite summer salads, as crowdsourced from Instagram
Strawberry balsamic kale salad
Steak tzatziki dense bean salad
Blackened chicken watermelon salad
Caesar slaw with crispy chicken
arugula, potato and green bean salad
pearl couscous salad with shrimp and feta
Israeli salad: “Chunky cut cucumbers, tomatoes, feta + thinly sliced red onion tossed with lemon juice, oil, salt, pepper and top with whatever protein you want.”
If you have a favorite summer salad, please share it in the comments to add to the roundup!
Salads I’ve made so far this summer
Cold soba noodle salad with spicy peanut sauce, NYT Cooking
Steak caprese salad, What’s Gaby Cooking
Summer steak with tomato and corn salad, Smitten Kitchen
Greek salad with souvlaki-ish chicken, Wishbone Kitchen cookbook
Asian-inspired chicken slaw from What’s Gaby Cooking
Broccoli salad with peanut sauce from Bon Appetit (if you’ve been to Emily or Emmy Squared in Brooklyn, this is their salad!)
Buffalo chicken salad: This one is my own recipe, but I try to riff off an excellent buffalo chicken salad I had at Meme’s Diner in Brooklyn: crispy buffalo chicken cutlets on top of a salad of crisp greens, cherry tomatoes, blue cheese, carrots, radishes, scallions, dressed in olive oil and red wine vinegar.
What I’m making for dinner this week
One thing I want to talk about more in this newsletter is meal planning — going to start sharing what I’m cooking for dinner each week, and I also want to hear about how other people make dinner happen (more on that in future editions!).
Most weeks, I try to cook at least 4 nights a week, from Sunday to Thursday, with the exceptions of nights I might have plans after work. Fridays and Saturdays I take a cooking break. I usually pick out all my recipes for the week on Saturday and make a grocery list based off of that plan, then place a grocery order on Saturday to arrive Sunday morning. (I wrote a guide to meal planning and my strategies here a couple years ago if you’re interested). Here’s what I’m making for dinner this week!
Sunday: Summer chicken chop salad, from What to Cook the newsletter
Monday: Pesto meatballs with tomato salad and labneh, from What to Cook the cookbook
Tuesday: I have plans, so no cooking
Wednesday: Cucumber crunch salad with tofu from Smitten Kitchen
Thursday: Sheet pan roasted salmon with Tuscan bread salad from NYT Cooking
Newsletters I’ve been enjoying recently
Sharing some Substack newsletters I’ve been really enjoying reading lately. These are the newsletters that I always open immediately when I see them in my inbox:
Cooking: I get so much inspiration from Caroline Chambers’ What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking — I’ve made dozens of her recipes. Also in keeping with our summer salad theme, I love Salad for President; I also love Jenn Lueke’s eat gooood and Ella Henry’s gut feelings for healthy, fresh, and seasonal recipes and meal plans
Fashion: All the best fashion writing and recommendations seem to be on Substack now. I love mom friend, Fashion Soup, The Midimalist, Girls of a Certain Age, I Want to Be Her, I Think It’s Brave (especially her corporate office outfit diaries, as someone always looking for office outfit inspiration) In other news, reading so many fashion substacks has been causing me to shop too much, but… these extremely stylish women have so many good recommendations!
Life: I’ve been loving Marina Cooley’s Professor Off Duty (especially her systems for managing home life/chaos).
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading and thanks for sticking around! More to come soon as I revive this newsletter more regularly going forward.
Welcome backkkk! So helpful! I've always loved your recipe recs.
I've missed you!! So glad to see you back. As a salad lover, this is the best kind of post