Seasonal Sundays (Week 21) Early-Summer Salads

Let's call this my official kickoff to "bring a salad" season, you know, for an impromptu dinner at the neighbor's, a picnic at that new state park, a church potluck, a graduation party, Canada's May Long Weekend, the U.S.'s Memorial Day barbecues. I have toooooo soooooooo many salad recipes! It took unflinching resolve to narrow so many down to a perfect special seven meant just for these few weeks of late spring and early summer. May you find a "keeper" or two or three! Or seven!

~ Skip Straight to the Good Stuff ~

~ PIN This ~

Welcome to Seasonal Sundays ...

Whole-food cooks face this challenge, right? We stock up on groceries, the fridge is full ... and there's still nothin' to just eat without, at minimum, getting out a knife and cutting board.

You know this from experience too? Me three.

So my not-100%-but-I-do-try strategy is to make sure that the fridge always has a salad (not just salad makings) and a soup (not just the stuff-of-soup ingredients) ready and waiting, just spoon it out, warm it up, bam, food on the table.

So it's no wonder that my personal collection of salad recipes (all laid out pretty and organized in this resource, Favorite Summer Salad Recipes) is s-u-b-s-t-a-n-t-i-a-l.

So, perhaps you'll join me with keeping a salad at hand?

Seasonal Sundays is 100% written by a real, live human, no blah-blah copycat ChatGPT AI plagiarism, thank you very much. Any awkward phrase, unclear meaning, misspelled word, mistaken fact, bad punctuation or overwrought alliteration is the clean, proud product of my own inadequacy as a wordsmith and inattention as an eagle-eyed editor. So when that human says she's grateful that you're here anyway, please know, she really truly 100% means it.

About the Photo By Popular Request, a Little Insight into the Top Image: Many years, a wren nest appears overnight on this decorative thingie on the summer porch. This year? No nest! So I tucked in a few artificial flowers (it's under an overhang, so live flowers don't do well). That next morning? Ms Wren must not've appreciated my lazy decorating. She summarily pulled out the flowers and ferns and built herself a spectacular nest. Sadly, we've not seen her since so I put the flowers back in, hoping my decorating atrocities would lure her back. So far ... no.

In Praise Of ... Living Side-by-Side with Wildlife

Is it this way every spring? This week we rescued ...

• ... a wolf spider as big as my palm, from the kitchen
• ... a tree frog as small as my little fingernail, from the kitchen
• ... a frog as big as my hand, from the pool skimmer basket
• ... a red-eyed, orange-winged cicada, an apparent vanguard of the next major emergence of the 13-year Brood XIX in 2024, from the dining room
• ... a pair of foot-long broad-headed skinks, him with the characteristic orange head, splashing frantically in the pool, trying to get out (sweet note: we grabbed these with the soft of a pool skimmer, my husband carried them to the woods where he said, they really didn't want to get out, and where the male moved close to the female and wrapped an arm around her, so anthropomorphic, of course, but he (my husband, that is, not the skink) was touched by the gesture and how do we really know anyway that lizards don't experience emotion? in fact, they just might, see National Library of Medicine, this is the take-away, "We found that reptiles were assumed to be capable of the following emotions and states; anxiety, distress, excitement, fear, frustration, pain, stress, and suffering, in 37 articles. We also found four articles that explored and found evidence for the capacity of reptiles to feel pleasure, emotion, and anxiety.")

Dumb Stuff.

AT LEAST I'M CONSISTENT You know how when the calendar switches from one year to the next and for a couple of days or weeks, you keep writing the old year? (Especially on checks, back in the day when we actually wrote checks.) It's been the same all this month, every day I type in 4/14 or 4/15 and then correct myself to 5/14, 5/15 etc. But. When I was taking a look back at this same week in 2020, my dad and I had mistakenly called my nephew to sing happy birthday on May 15th, even though we'd called him the month before on his actual birthday, April 15th.

May I Suggest ... a Link?

Let me just presume that if you're reading this, well, you're both a cook and a recipe collector. Don't the two kinda go together? And that means you tuck aside interesting recipes all over the place and then, dang, where is that chicken recipe that looked so good anyway? Here's an idea. Start a folder on your phone, call it "Kitchen Parade" or "Alanna" or whatever makes best sense to you. Then save the recipes you're most interested in right there in one place. Easy Peasy.

• Start here?
• Favorite Summer Salad Recipes

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SEASONAL INSPIRATION: Seven Salads for "Bring a Salad Season"

I have enough salad recipes, I could make a different two every week and still not make them all. But I set out to make this an extra-special early-summer edition of Seasonal Sundays, one you might refer to for the next few weeks. Here's the challenge I made to myself:

• Budget-Minded
• Make-Ahead
• Easy to Keep on Hand or Carry Somewhere
• Easy to Scale Up or Down
• Crowd Pleasers
• A Mix of Familiar Favorites & a Few Out of the Ordinary
• Healthy, Naturally
• Fresh, Easy-to-Find Vegetables
• Early Summer, So No Corn or Tomatoes or Eggplant or Beans, Yet.

So I hope you find lots of inspiration here, cuz salad season it is, baby!

FYI for some of you who are new to Kitchen Parade and/or the weekly Seasonal Sundays newsletters. While some of these salad recipes come from Kitchen Parade, many are published at A Veggie Venture, that's my food blog about vegetables, a veggie lover's paradise for an A-Z of Vegetable recipes, seasonal to staples, savory to sweet, salads to sides, soups to supper, simple to special.

Okay, then. Let's get to choppin'.

• THE RECIPE Green Cabbage Salad with Fresh Lime Vinaigrette Somehow more "salad" than "slaw".
• ANOTHER TAKE Alice Waters' Coleslaw No mayo, bright with lime and cilantro. (PIN This)

• THE RECIPE Smitten Kitchen's Avocado-Cucumber Salad Addictively good, so many variations.
• ANOTHER TAKE Cucumber-Mango Salad Made special by tiny spikes of honey and hot sauce.

• THE RECIPE Savory Orange Slices A simple and surprising orange salad.
• ANOTHER TAKE Orange & Avocado Salad Simple but sumptuous. (PIN This)

• THE RECIPE Dill Pickle Pasta Salad A surprising pickle-y combination, a favorite for potlucks and pickle fans. (PIN This)
• ANOTHER TAKE Greek Pasta Salad Loaded with veggies, dressed with a creamy feta vinaigrette.

• THE RECIPE Bloody Mary Salad A jello salad with kick.
• ANOTHER TAKE Tomato Soup Vegetable Salad An old-fashioned salad makeover.

• THE RECIPE Celery & Chickpea Salad A captivating salad, crunchy celery, creamy chickpeas and tangy feta.
• ANOTHER TAKE Chipotle Chickpea Salad A fresh, summer salad with a smidgin of heat, substantial enough for dinner.

• THE RECIPE Finnish Summer Potato Salad Just new potatoes and a simple vinaigrette.
• ANOTHER TAKE Mom’s Potato Salad All her tricks for extra-good potato salad.

• THE COLLECTION Favorite Summer Salad Recipes From sides to suppers, make-ahead to eat-it-now, simple to sumptuous, all special for summer. (PIN This)
• AND ANOTHER Favorite Summer Soup Recipes

What's New?!

Wondering about a recipe from the last while? Check Recent Recipes from Kitchen Parade and Recent Vegetable Recipes from A Veggie Venture.

• THE RECIPE Easy-Easy Artichoke & Tomato Salad Make it quick, make it your own. (PIN This)

Compliments!

• THIS WEEK our friend Charlie wrote to say that his sister in Dallas (hey, Carolyn!) tried the hummingbird nectar and immediately, a hummer showed up!
• IT'S FOR THE BIRDS Hummingbird Food Just sugar and water in the right ratio. It's fun! (PIN This)

• THIS WEEK Funny thing, this week. A faithful reader from Madison (that would be Mary who introduced us all to the wonder of Manna Café Oatcakes (Oatmeal Pancakes)) wrote to share a pie recipe she thought I might like. It came from a friend (along with two slices of said pie!) who in turn got it from his own friend. Turns out? That recipe and "mine" are 99.99% the same! I first published mine back in 2006, maybe the friend of a friend was/is a follower too? Anyway. I'm putting blueberry pie on the menu for Memorial Day ...
• THE RECIPE Blueberry Sour Cream Pie Berries puffed in light, sweet cream.

Looking Ahead ...

• May 29 - Memorial Day, yikes, next weekend!
• June 1 - Alanna's first official day of summer

Looking Back ...

• Seven Spring Recipes to Make a Mom's Life Just a Little Bit Easier (Week 20) (PIN This)
• Strawberry Season (Week 19) (PIN This)
• Mexican Meal Prep (Week 18) (PIN This)
• Feta Lovers (Week 17)
• Asparagus Season! (Week 16)
• Quick Pickles (Week 15)
• Celebration Breads & Cakes (Week 14)
• Sides for Spring Celebrations (Week 13)
• Cabbage Fever (Week 12 & apparently we're fellow cabbage lovers!)
• Spring Pies & Tarts (Week 11)
• Rotisserie Chicken Recipes (Week 10)

Just Updated!

• THE RECIPE Savory Cauliflower Cake A moist, sturdy savory cake, strewn with bits of soft cauliflower with a touch of parmesan. (PIN This)
• ANOTHER TAKE Savory Muffins with Sweet Potato & Feta Totally sugar free, studded with roasted sweet potato and creamy feta.

• THE RECIPE Strawberry Rhubarb Cobbler With a buttery cornmeal crumble topping. (PIN This)
• ANOTHER TAKE Country Rhubarb Cobbler Layers of sweet biscuit and warm rhubarb.

Don't Be a Stranger ...

I'd love to hear from you. Comment, send me a quick e-mail (my current address is in the FAQs), dot-dash in Morse code, build a fire for smoke signals, launch a message in a bottle, send a Christmas letter, get the dog to yip, toss me a note wrapped in a rubberband, write a message in the sky, scratch a note in the sand, listen to a seashell, tuck a question into a plastic Easter egg, whatever.

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Kitchen Parade is written by second-generation food columnist Alanna Kellogg and features fresh, seasonal dishes for every-day healthful eating and occasional indulgences. Quick Suppers are Kitchen Parade favorites and feature recipes easy on the budget, the clock, the waistline and the dishwasher. Do you have a favorite recipe that other Kitchen Parade readers might like? Just send me a quick e-mail, you'll find my current address in the FAQs. How to print a Kitchen Parade recipe. Never miss a recipe! If you like this recipe, sign up for a free e-mail subscription. If you like Kitchen Parade, you're sure to like my food blog about vegetable recipes, too, A Veggie Venture. When you make my recipes, I'd love to know your results! Just leave a comment below or better still, on the specific recipe's page.

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