Pantry-Friendly Salad Dress-Ups

Vegetables are delicious if you know what to do with them.  If you get bored with vegetables or don't know how to add more to your diet, the I think the key is variety!  

Today I'm going to share with you a few ways to dress up a salad.  If you want to eat a salad for lunch more often than you do:  the key is variety.  Switch it up.  Play around.  Variety.  The Salad Dress-Ups I'm sharing with you today are all pantry-friendly, even though the salad part would obviously need to be fresh.

I've loved salad as long as I can remember.  When I was little, my family only went out to dinner on birthdays, and the birthday kid could pick wherever they wanted to go.  I only had this chance ONCE a year, and I picked the same restaurant every.single.time because it had an all-you-can-eat salad bar.  And I think that's the key to loving salad (and maybe especially getting a little kid to love salad): variety.  I loved that I could build my own salad, make it different every time, and add so many different things for different flavors.

a super awesome picture of me at 7 years old 

And here's a funny secret.  I really don't like lettuce.  And maybe that's why I loved (and still do) a salad bar.  I get enough lettuce to call it a salad and then fill it with things I do love like tomatoes and cucumbers and olives.

This recipe is a little bit different than most of the recipes you'll see here at Easy Pantry Recipes because this one does require some fresh ingredients such as lettuce.  However, most of the ingredients are things you can keep in your pantry and pull out any time to dress up a salad.

For this recipe, I will be listing fresh ingredients in italics and pantry-friendly ingredients in regular text.   Ingredients are listed in 5 parts, and the key here is to mix and match whatever you like, doing it the same or different every time.  So, let's go!

PANTRY-FRIENDLY SALAD DRESS-UPS

PREP TIME:  5 or 10 minutes or something
COOK TIME:  none

INGREDIENTS, PART 1:  the greens

• lettuce such as green leaf, butter, red leaf, romaine, iceberg, etc.
• spring mix
• spinach

INGREDIENTS, PART 2:  vegetables, in bite-size pieces

• tomatoes (fresh or canned, drained)
• cucumbers
• shredded carrots
• peas (fresh, frozen/thawed, or freeze-dried for a nice crunch)
• avocado
• broccoli
• cauliflower
• olives
• any other vegetables you like

INGREDIENTS, PART 3:  protein

• shredded cheese (fresh, or my favorite: freeze-dried cheese.  It's delicious dry straight out of the can!  Leave it that way for a crunch in your salad, or rehydrate it.)
• beans (canned/rinsed/drained, such as chick peas, black beans, pinto beans, black-eyed peas, etc.)
• meat (such as chopped lunch meat or canned chicken rinsed and drained or rehydrated freeze-dried chicken)
• boiled eggs
• nuts such as almond slices or chopped pecans

INGREDIENTS, PART 4:  the crunch (great way to dress up a salad!)

• (freeze-dried cheese or peas fit this category, as do nuts)
• croutons
• tortilla chips or corn chips (I got the Fritos idea from Mary at Barefeet in the Kitchen in her great post "How to Eat Salad Every Day and Like It.")
• French-fried onions

INGREDIENTS, PART 5:  dressing (pantry-friendly until you open them, then they need refrigeration)

• lemon or lime juice
• bottled dressing such as ranch, blue cheese, Italian, Greek, or any favorite dressing

DIRECTIONS

Pile your salad high with your favorite greens, vegetables, and proteins, then top with crunch and dressing. 

Try this recipe, then comment and let me know how you like it!  And Pin it to Pinterest to save and share using the image below.

Save and share this recipe by Pinning this image to Pinterest.

To print this recipe, hit the "print" button below.  If you don't see the print button, scroll back up and click on the title of this blog post, then scroll back down and you'll find the button below.