The summer salad sweet and savory is a fresh and colorful preparation made with vegetables, fresh fruit, dried fruit, and Parmesan cheese. It is a light dish, very easy, suitable for summer, when you can’t turn on the stove due to the heat or simply don’t feel like it, and not necessarily only in summer. The sweet and savory salad can be served as a side dish or as a snack even outside the home and enriched and personalized according to one’s tastes and needs. It’s the ideal recipe to detox after the abundant feasting of festive days.
- Difficulty: Very easy
- Cost: Economical
- Preparation time: 15 Minutes
- Portions: 4
- Cooking methods: No cooking
- Cuisine: Italian
- Seasonality: Spring, Summer, and Autumn
Ingredients
- 1 head Iceberg lettuce
- 20 shelled walnuts
- 20 shelled almonds
- 20 pitted green olives
- 1 apple
- 1 lemon
- 1/2 red onion (preferably Tropea)
- some multigrain wholemeal bread (or other cheese if desired)
- to taste extra virgin olive oil (or Greek yogurt to dress)
Steps
1) Wash the leaves of the iceberg lettuce, break them into pieces, and let the excess water drain. Then put them in a salad bowl. Thinly slice the onion and add it to the lettuce. Shell and also add the chopped walnuts and almonds. Add the pitted and coarsely chopped green olives and the Parmesan shavings.
2) Also wash and thinly slice the apple (Golden, for example), add it to the rest of the ingredients, and spray everything with the lemon juice and extra virgin olive oil in the desired amounts. Mix gently and immediately serve our fresh and tasty salad accompanied by whole wheat rye, multigrain, or white bread, according to taste.
If the salad is not to be eaten immediately, it should still be stored in the fridge, in a well-sealed container, and some ingredients should be added only at the last moment.
For example, I’m referring to the apple (to avoid excessive oxidation), the oil (which could “cook” the salad leaves, i.e., make them too mushy), the lemon (which could make everything too sour).
3) You will notice that I did not add salt because the olives and Parmesan provide the salty part that will contrast with the sweetness of the apple and dried fruit.
4) Dried fruit is already high in calories on its own, so if we don’t want to use oil, we can dress our delicious sweet and savory summer salad with plain Greek yogurt.
For a little extra idea. Dried fruit can be replaced with cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, fennel, carrots, chia seeds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and so on.
