Smarter Six-Flavored Salad Blueprint

This past weekend, it reeeealllly felt like we ushered in summer. The weather was warm, the lilacs were blooming all over town, the swimming pools opened and afternoon felt like the right time to eat ice cream cones as a snack. Just a few days ahead of the meteorological solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, it felt like nature was ready to dive in.

I could see the shift in the market; chubby carrots ready to be chewed on, plump radishes and turnips beading with moisture, and so so so many tender greens just waiting to be tossed into bountiful salads. AT LAST, the salad season is here.

I can feel the shift to summer it in my body too; the desire to lighten up, get playful, get outside and sync up with the bounty about to be unloaded upon us. And my friends, that means SALAD. Yes, the misleadingly universal “meal of health”that I spend most of the year encouraging you NOT to eat (because it doesn’t serve you very well anytime but now!) is finally ripe and ready for you to dig in!

The salad days of summer are more than just the time of year when we expect our best; we also expect that our best will come easily. Especially when it comes to…well, salad.  But nothing worthwhile ever comes without lifting a finger, and, in the case of salads, if we lift our fingies just a tiny bit, our bodies will thank us for it. We’ll keep our stamina, max our performance, keep our digestion, metabolism and assimilation strong. And that will ensure a completely lit season of play, adventure, and general thriving.

Let the low-lift, high-fi salad days begin.

How to eat in summer

There are two things I want to say about eating in the summer time. The first is: get yourself to the market and just plop down right in the middle, indulging in whatever is on offer without doing ANYTHING to it, because it’s perfect. But the other part of me knows that if we do just a *tiny* bit to those incredible ingredients we get to benefit a great deal more from their plant-intelligence.

How to healthfully hack the season:

• Carb up: Eat a diet higher in carbohydrates, and favor sweet, bitter and astringent flavors as well as room temperature foods.
• Avoid ice cold foods.
• Follow the formula: generally speaking, following the formula of 60% carbohydrate / 20% fat/ 20% protein is a good rule of thumb for aligning with this season. Your individual constitution may require a tweak of this formula.
• Favor: milk, butter and ghee, sweeteners, grains such as oats, wheat, rice and barley, all sweet fruits, bitter and astringent vegetables, spices such as fennel, mint, cardamom, poultry and white-flesh fishes, and olive or coconut oils.
• Significantly reduce: fermented foods, honey and molasses, sour fruits (typically unripe,) alliums and nightshades (peppers and tomatoes,) red meats and pungent spices to prevent overcooking pitta dosha.
• Strategize smaller meals: space meals 2-3 hours apart to keep metabolism high + nutrient absorption strong.
• Favor light and cooling foods: both in temperature and in bioenergetic value. Easy to digest salads (keep reading!), smart smoothies, cool soups and sweet fruits are excellent choices for hot summer days. Herbs such as basil, mint, cilantro, and dill are bioenergetically cooling!
• Favor lighter protein and fat sources: specifically plant-based.

Smarter salad days

So here’s the thing about a salad – you could totally just toss everything into your broadest bowl raw. And that would be *fine.* But it wouldn’t be very satisfying, or very digestible, or very flavorful. By lifting those little fingies we were talking about just a tiiinnnny bit, you can max all of these things AND max the benefits that you get from your salads. A few rules to follow:

1. cook or grill your veg: this makes them easier to digest, and often a little heat helps bring out the flavors of the fabulous seasonal vegetables you’ve selected.
2. don’t skimp on protein and carbohydrates: to be honest, the smartest salad you can have in the summer looks a whole lot more like a grain bowl than a salad. Reason being, we need carbohydrates for energy in this season, ESPECIALLY when we’re active, and we’re not going to get many of those from a bowl of leaves. Load up the leaves, add healthy whole grains, light proteins like fish, chicken and plant-based sources, or fresh cheeses, and go to town.
3. squeeze in all Six Flavors: remember, as active humans, the bulk of our foods in any season should be coming from sweet flavors to fuel our endeavours. NOT from the bitter and astringent flavors that comprise a fresh salad. It’s pretty easy to make this happen when you make sure you’re getting those proteins and fats we’re talking about, AND when you add a little kick of pungent (black pepper!) sour (dressing! acid!) So, check yourself and make sure you’re getting all Six Flavors in your bowls for best results.

Some recent favorite salad bowls + salad hacks:

A Springy Panzanella: with arugula, grilled asparagus, peas, radishes, sliced avocado, chunks of fresh goat cheese + homemade croutons from this favorite salad. For this salad, I used a pistachio-pesto inspired bt this sando spread as the dressing by simply adding water to make it loose. Then, I tossed the croutons into the dressing before pouring the whole delicious mess on the salad. Brilliant, if I do say so myself.

A Grilled Paneer Salad:  w/grilled radishes, steamed quinoa, leftover green falafel inspired by this recipe, a squeeze of tahini and lemon, and tender mixed greens

California-Transplant Bowl: w/tender greens, edible flowers, millet-carrot pilaf, grilled salmon, cardamom-pickled beets, a drizzle of tahini + cider vinegar, and a sprinkle of hemp seeds.

Grain base: I love using leftover steamed grains as a base to build a heartier salad (as in the California Transplant Bowl above.) Steamed millet, cooked with shredded carrot and spices served as lovely base on which to add other components and make a meal. Greens don’t have to be the first ingredient.

Make it ahead: My rice cooker and InstantPot do not get a break in the summer time, and instead they pump out grains and legumes I can toss into salads non stop. If you haven’t already invested, I strongly suggest you to do keep your meals quick and easy, and your kitchen less steamy this season. When it comes to grilling veggies and proteins, we have an Ooni pizza oven that makes it all happen (plus, sometimes pizza!) ridiculously fast, fun and delicious. Any grill will do, but this is how I do it.

Add something creamy: I love a vinaigrette dressing, but summer salads often require grounding. I use chunks of avocado, scoops of coconut butter, dollops of hummus, fresh chunks of soft cheese and even tahini swirled into my dressing to give salad bowls some welcome weight.

 

Salad situations I reduce in the summer

• Red meat: there are definitely times when my body craves red meat, and when those times hit I abide. But most of the time, I know that my body is grateful for lighter protein sources like legumes, fish, chicken and fresh cheese, so these are the proteins I stick with.
• Combining meats and cheeses: these two foods are notoriously challenging to digest. And, during the summer, our metabolism loses strength as resources are relegated to keeping our bodies cool. I avoid heavy-to-digest combinations like this to keep assimilation high (and performance at it’s peak.)
• Overdoing the nuts: I love nuts, but they don’t love my pitta-elevated body back in the summer. So, I switch to seeds. That means that handfuls of cashews, almonds, peanut butter sauces and dressings and the like are reserved for cooler months. See me sprinkling sunflower, pepita, sesame, hemp all summer long.

Ready, set, salad

To recap: yes! This is the season of easy, breezy cooking, where salads are not just the fastest version of the thing, but also what nature wants us to eat. BUT, just because we can eat only raw vegetables doesn’t mean that’s how we’ll keep performing at our peak. Incorporating some easy salad-building principles will help keep our meals super-nutritious, our bodies thriving, our digestive systems strong, our metabolism amped…and our adventures, challenges and efforts well-fueled all season long.

The recipe below is laid out in a “blueprint” format, to make it easy for you to build a six-flavored bowl. The ingredients listed in the blueprint below are what Ayurveda recommends for bioenergetic cooling of pitta dosha through the summer. Pick your favorites and build away!

One last note on salad dressings: I love making dressings, but this feels like an extra fussy step for many of you. SO! Know that drizzling your salad with a few critically-flavored ingredients will do the trick. No need to overdo things.