Your Friday Five: Salad Season is On

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Transcript

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Welcome my friends. You have made it to another Friday. Congratulations. Your week is hopefully wrapping up soon. Today I wanna talk about summer salads. If you're living in the part of the country like me, it's starting to get warmer. The sun is out, it's gorgeous. You wanna be outside. Salad fits so nicely in with that, and I kind of find it's like, you know, with your closet, you sometimes need to seasonally rotate things. You need to get those short sleeve tops, the shorts, the dresses, you kinda need to pull it to the front of the closet. I feel that that's with our nutrition. We need to crank this lever this time of year and just course correct. And sometimes it involves more salad. So I wanna give you the two that I love the most right now. But I think this is a really good opportunity to just say, Hey, pop online onto social. Put in the hashtag summer salads and see what pops up. People have so many amazing ideas, but here are ones that have been tried and true and tested and I have stuck with for a long time. Some of you are gonna think it's far out. That's totally fine. Alright, so the first one that I wanna go over is just a simple cucumber salad. We actually, growing up, we made this every single evening. We always started a meal with this, or this was always on our plate in some capacity. So you cut up a cucumber. If you want, you can cut up some tomato in there as well. Sometimes if you have, for example, like green bell peppers, those can work great too. Remember, the predominant thing in the salad though is gonna be the cucumbers. Less tomatoes, even less of the green bell peppers if you cut that up. So you're gonna cut that all up and then seasoning. You can use salt, you can use garlic, salt, whatever you wanna do. But what we're gonna use as liquid in this, to kinda let it marinate a little bit, you're gonna use some rice vinegar, you're gonna use a little bit of olive oil. And then the missing ingredient that is gonna turn this from an average, nothing to. Pure perfection where you say, wow, gimme a cup of that. That's amazing. I want to eat more of it. It's to add, there's a, a liquid, um, that you can put in. It's called Maggi, M-A-G-G-I. I'll make sure that we put a link beneath this little clip in case you have no idea what I'm talking about. If you haven't ever heard, I believe that it's an Asian, liquid seasoning, if you would. I don't know the right word to use for that, but it gives the salad the most amazing taste. You do not need to put a lot of this on it. It's literally five to 10 drops, so it comes out. Very little a drop at a time and you put a few drops on your salad and that with the vinegar and the oil and the salt on your stuff in general, you stir that up, it's right away an amazing taste. And the other super nice thing about the salad is that it keeps great for days as well.'cause it keeps getting more and more marinated and tasting even better. So I routinely will make it for dinner or lunch whenever I'm having it. I have it at that meal, but then I'll also have it for several other days. For example, I made it yesterday, had it with dinner, and then today for lunch I had some before I had my lunch. It's a really nice low calorie version to really get some good, uh, veggies in there. It, it really wakes up your taste buds, like it's just a super nice profile. Okay. The other one that. Again, if you haven't made this, you're gonna think that sounds horrible. But I'll tell you where I learned this recipe in medical school. I had a friend that was really good at making things, and whenever we would get together, everyone had like their thing that they brought. So one girl would make the pizza one, this girl would make the salad. I don't remember. One girl brought diet coke. Like we all, we all, we all had our thing. Honestly, I can't remember what mine was. Maybe I was the. Person that brought like napkins. I don't, I don't remember. But the point is, she made this recipe and at first I thought, oh my gosh. But then when I tasted it, it's divine. Okay. So this salad is best, ironically with like a baby spinach as the base, but you could use whatever, any other salad. But I like to use baby spinach. So you have that as the base of it, and then you put on very, very finely chopped red onion. Not a lot. I mean, I think she was pretty aggressive with it, but as I've. I gotten to do it over time, not more than like an eighth of a small one. Like very, a small amount, right? Really disperse it well, a along among the salad, and then in there you throw a few dried cranberries. So those are gonna be very sweet. And then you're also gonna throw a few chopped walnuts in there. Then what's gonna really put this over the edge is you can use any dressing. But if I really like to get a sugar-free vinegarette, this really keeps it on the low calorie side. And you put that on it, you stir this up and that vinegarette dressing the sort of like a sugar-free raspberry vinegarette is what I use that dressing with the onion, with the cranberry, with the walnut, with the baby spinach. It is divine. This is something I make it so often over the summer, and there's something about it that just feels good with digestion, tastes amazing. And so are there summer salads that you make? If so, bust those out. This is the time of year, you know, and again, a friendly reminder here that. Our nutrition does not need to be something where it's drudgery, it tastes bad. The thing is this, you're not gonna stick with things like that. So remember, nutritious food and things that really support our gut microbiome, they can taste phenomenal. I had the other day, this is unrelated to salads, but just talking about feeding our gut microbiome. I had a, a German moose leaf, which is think like oats. There's some raisins in it. What else? Anyway, I put some milk with it. I put some berries with it, a little bit of banana it was such a phenomenal meal. It was different. My body was like, thank you. That was phenomenal. I really wanted that. Right. So we don't only need to do the plain Greek yogurt where we just think, Ugh, I can't stick with this. The dried chicken breast that tastes horrible. You're not gonna stick with those things. It's gotta have flavor. It's gotta have some variety. It's gotta reach a few different notes with what you're eating, right? So bust out some different recipes. Come back to these recipes that really worked for you, dust them off. It's time to bring'em out again. Anyway, I hope you have a great Friday. Maybe this is an idea or two that you can go try, message me on Social Matia MD on both Instagram and TikTok. Message me if you have a recipe where it's really working for you. I would love to hear about it. All right. Have an amazing rest of the weekend.