Summer Salad Season

The leaves are unfurling on the leaves, the sun is starting to warm up and with the change in the clocks, are evenings are beginning to get longer. It’s coming to that time of year that I love – full of al fresco dining and fresh summer salads! And that is great news for our health as fresh salads and raw vegetables are so good for our health as well as for our waistlines. In fact eating salads regularly can have such amazing health benefits for us that I am going to spend the next few months trying to encourage all you to really embrace the summer salad and get munching on those crunchy leaves!

Now not all salads are created equal and just because it’s a ‘salad’ doesn’t automatically mean it’s a low calorie, healthy option. If you saw ‘Britain’s Favourite Foods – Are They Good For You’ last week on BBC 2, you would have seen how a pasta and cheese salad and a Parma ham and avocado salad with dressing came in at a whopping 803 and 547 calories respectively. That was far higher than the burger and chips they compared them to. But you don’t need to load your salad with unhealthy croutons, dressings and calorie-dense ingredients to make them tasty!

Many of us think of salads as a boring limp lettuce leaf wilting on the side of the main dish and just the idea of eating a salad as our main meal can bring on the hunger pangs. But I want to show you not only how fantastic salads are to all aspects of our bodies but just how exciting, tasty and satisfying they can be.

So over the next 3 months I am going to be looking at some amazing salad ingredients, what they can do for our health and how you can use them to create beautiful and tasty meals this summer. I’m going to start in the coming weeks to look at leaves and show you that there is so much more to salad than just an iceburg lettuce! Then later in the series we will look at some of the more interesting ingredients you can use to pimp your salad and make them even more delicious and nutritious.

So join me next week when we start out Love Your Leaves series and take a look at that salad classic – lettuce.