I love to serve a great crisp and simple green salad with a zingy dressing to balance the unctuousness (my husband’s favorite word) of a dish like short ribs or beef bourguignon. If you wanna chat about horseradish let me know. I always love to turn new people on to one of my favorite roots!

This title is only kind of sort of a joke. You know you’ve thought about your plating for an insta pic before… Turns out your stomach and instagram like the same thing, lots of color, varied texture and large bowls.  This salad is a winner because you can basically throw anything in it that you’ve got going on in your fridge, the more vegetables and the more color the better. Use your vegetables before they go bad!  If you’re not into chickpeas and you want to make this salad to take to work feel free to throw on any protein you feel like.

This is a perfect grain salad to keep in your fridge and munch on during the week or serve warm as a side with dinner. It’s super flavorful, easy to adapt based on whatever ingredients you have lying around, and is fun to munch on.

If you’ve enjoyed a kale salad at a restaurant but your homemade salad makes you feel like you’re grazing in a bitter pasture, the secret is the kale massage. Kale only tastes good in a salad if you give it a massage first. Simply remove those nasty kale ribs, cut up the kale, then take bunches of kale and rub the heck out of them with a bit of dressing.  They should start to look darker and taste less bitter.  

If you live in LA, then you've been to a Hillstone Restaurant. There are like a billion of them and they're always crowded. You might walk in and think "WHY IS THIS CHAIN SO CROWDED ALL THE TIME?!?" ... but then you eat the food and you're like "OH YES THIS FOOD IS SO GOOD." Where was I going with this? Oh yes, the cornbread. They have THE BEST cornbread, so I found the recipe and yoinked it. In trying to come up with a really delicious salad to highlight summer corn, I thought, why not up the corn salad with my favorite cornbread croutons. It’s like corn on corn on corn.

If I'm going to be turning on the grill at all (and by "turning on" I mean prepping the charcoal and crossing my fingers that it gets hot), I like to utilize it as much as possible. I learn a lot just by throwing random things on the grill. It's sort of miraculous how much a fruit or vegetable can change simply by being grilled... sometimes for the better, sometimes not so much. The peach is one thing that really, really changes on a grill. The sugars in the peach caramelize and the fruit picks up a seductive smoke quality. Even fruit that starts out as slightly under ripe takes on a buttery texture after being grilled. The whole thing is pretty special. This salad is a great way to utilize the peach, get in some greens, and still keep all your friends happy.