Tips for Making a Leafy Green Salad

A leafy green salad is a great addition to any meal, as vegetables go good with all foods, including meats and starches. The salads are generally low in calories, but high in nutrients, which means that they will fill you up without all the extra calories.

Leafy green salads are also high in fiber, which latches onto the buildup within the digestive tract and eliminates it from the body. You can enjoy these salads as a snack, or even in a meal by themselves, or as a side dish.

Leafy green salads are easy to make, and you can add just about any ingredient that you like. But there a few things to keep in mind in order to make the salad the best that it can be.

Use Fresh Produce

Produce begins to lose its freshness and its nutrients as soon as it is picked. Therefore, always eat your produce the day that you purchase it, or at least within the next day or two. Even better, grow your own vegetables if you have a garden. And if you do not have a garden, you might want to consider growing a patio garden, or even an indoor vegetable garden, as vegetables are fairly easy to grow.

Make Your Own Dressing

Next, always, always, always make your own salad dressings for your leafy green salads. The bottled stuff that you can buy contains many artificial ingredients and food additives that do not belong in the human body.

Salad dressings are very easy and quick to make. All you need is a bit of olive oil, lemon juice, and a hint of sea salt and pepper, and you are all set. You can also add vinegar, herbs and many other spices to make a rich dressing. Avocados and ground flax seed are also great for a dressing.

Just make sure that you use the dressing up that same day, or at least the next day, as fresh produce such as lemon juice and avocados go rancid very quick.

Add Nuts and Seeds

For a salad topping, you can add your favorite nuts and seeds. They not only add to the flavor of the salad, but they are also rich with proteins, and healthy fats that can help with the absorption of fat soluble vitamins.

To enhance the flavor of the nuts, you can lightly toast them. Just make sure that you allow them to cool thoroughly before adding them in with the leafy greens, as the warmth can cause the greens to wilt fast.