Vegan German Potato Salad

Vegan German Potato Salad PinThis Vegan German Potato Salad recipe tastes a lot like the potato salad my German grandmother made when I was a kid. It’s very vinegary and flavorful.

Traditional German Potato Salad is made with bacon so we simply omitted that and didn’t notice its absence. However, you may be able to simulate that flavor by adding some liquid smoke into the dressing. Bacon gets most of its flavor from the liquid smoke it’s bathed in, so adding a little of it to this recipe might do the trick.

Or you could use some bacon bits, which are vegan because they aren’t made of bacon. They’re not healthy, either, but they do taste like bacon. If you try either of these options, please let us know what you think.

Amelia liked the crunch of the raw celery and green onion, but I would prefer it slightly sautéed so there’s not as much difference in texture between the raw veggies and the cooked soft potatoes. It’s a weird texture thing for me to bite into a soft potato and then hit a crunchy piece of celery. If you’re like me, you might want to sauté the celery and onion in a little veggie broth to soften them up.

This recipe pairs well with any vegan burger, corn-on-the-cob, green beans or your favorite vegan dishes.

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.

Easy Garden Salad

Easy Garden Salad PinI make this Easy Garden Salad every 3 to 4 days. It makes enough for 6 to 8 large salads so it saves a lot of time in salad prep. It’s also highly nutritious and checks off several of Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen boxes.

We used to make our salads individually, but we found that life often got in the way and we didn’t have time to make them. That’s when I came up with the idea to make a giant salad when I did have time, and store the ingredients in the fridge so they were ready when we wanted to eat them.

Save the scraps in a sealable container that you can keep in the freezer to make your Easy Vegetable Broth from Scraps. We have found that making our own veggie broth not only tastes better than store bought, it doesn’t contain oil or other preservatives, saves the packaging and makes great use of the scraps we were throwing away. We were using at least one veggie broth container per week so it saves us about $20/month.

Until recently, I put the greens and the toppings in the same container, but I found that all the tasty parts migrated to the bottom of the container making it difficult to dish out. To fix that issue, I now store the greens in a separate container from the colorful toppings.

When we’re ready to eat this delicious garden salad, we put a bunch of greens (spinach, kale, swiss chard, mustard greens, arugula, mixed greens, lettuce, etc.) in a large bowl and then scoop out a cup of the rainbow and put that on top of the greens.

Our rainbow usually consists of carrots, cucumber, peppers, corn, beets, red cabbage, artichoke hearts (in water), hearts of palm, garbanzo beans, red onion and tomatoes. We also like Golden Berries (Uvillas or Peruvian Ground Cherries) that we get here in Ecuador. They’re a little yellow cherry tomato sized fruit with a citrus flavor.

Easy Garden Salad

Then we top the salad with nuts, seeds, olives and/or avocado for some healthy fats to help us get at all those fat soluble nutrients in the salad. You can also top your salad with some Tahini Salad Dressing or other nut or avocado based homemade salad dressings, but it’s best to avoid oil-based salad dressings because oil isn’t a whole food; it’s a processed refined fat.

We usually eat our salads with lime juice and some form of vinegar (rice wine vinegar, red wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar, white balsamic vinegar). Sometimes we use soy sauce, tamari or Bragg’s Liquid Aminos.

Then we sprinkle our Easy Garden Salad with a generous amount of oregano and sometimes red pepper flakes and/or fennel seeds to get even more antioxidants.

Try different dark leafy greens, veggies and dressings in your salad to keep things interesting. According to Dr. Esselstyn, Dr. Greger, Dr. Barnard, Dr. Kahn, Dr. Fuhrman and other plant-based doctors, we should all eat at least one large dark leafy green salad — every — single — day. So find things you like and try new things, too.

This recipe pairs well with any of our soups or sandwiches.

Easy Garden Salad Cooking Video on Vegans Abroad

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.

Summer Black Bean Salad

Summer Black Bean Salad PinThis Oil-Free Summer Black Bean Salad recipe was inspired by a recipe from Amelia’s Aunt Marie. It’s easy to make and full of color and flavor. It tastes great all by itself as a side dish, or over a leafy green salad.

Last time we were back in Atlanta visiting Amelia’s family, her mom Jane made us this dish and everyone loved it! Aunt Marie included olive oil and cheese in her recipe, so we just removed those and didn’t notice them missing. In fact, I’m guessing the cheese would overpower the mild flavors of the other veggies.

A friend of ours told us this recipe is similar to Cowboy Caviar. However, real Cowboy Caviar also has black-eyed peas, diced tomatoes, and several other seasonings. Aunt Marie’s recipe is certainly a lot easier to make with its fewer ingredients and most of the flavor coming from the salsa.

Amelia’s mom inspired us to make more dishes with salsa as the flavor enhancer. It’s a lot easier and faster to make a delicious dish when all you have to do is open a jar of salsa and pour it in. We generally use my Grandpa’s Vegan Dipping Hot Sauce instead of store-bought salsa because we think it tastes better and it also saves us about $3/jar.

This recipe makes a great side salad for your favorite Mexican dishes, like Vegan Tortilla Soup or Mexican Lasagna.

If you choose to eat this Summer Black Bean Salad over leafy greens, you may want to add some fresh lime juice and/or vinegar to the greens beforehand to give them more flavor.

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.

Spinach Salad

Spinach Salad PinThis Spinach Salad is one of our mainstays. With only 48 calories per serving, it’s a low calorie delicious nutritious powerhouse side salad!

Spinach is a good source of Vitamin A, Vitamin C, iron, calcium and folate. It may also help prevent cancer and heart disease, making it one of the most important dark leafy greens you can eat. We try to eat it several times per week, if not every day.

Making a delicious salad like this takes time. That’s why we make enough for 6 servings, eat 2 servings and store the other 4 servings for up to 3 days in a sealable container in the fridge.

We do this with all of our salads to save time. Just be sure to add the vinegar or other liquid toppings when you serve the salad to prevent it from becoming soggy.

We use this recipe as a simple side salad, but we also like to jazz it up with some garbanzo beans, walnuts, pecans, sesame seeds, diced avocado, shaved carrots, celery, dried cranberries or whatever else we have on hand. These ingredients add a lot of extra calories and protein, making them ideal for turning this side salad into a main course.

This salad pairs well with some Broccoli Soup or Celery and Potato Soup for a healthy, low calorie, filling lunch.

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.

Cucumber Salad

Cucumber Salad PinThis Cucumber Salad is a fresh and delicious summer favorite that tastes great year round. It’s very easy to make with lots of tasty leftovers. One serving only has 18 calories, so you could eat as much as you want!

My mom has made this recipe my entire life, but I never liked cucumbers until going plant-based. A lot of vegans and plant-based eaters talk about how much their tastes change over time as they eat more plant foods and less of the addictive, taste numbing sugar, salt and fat.

Cucumbers are one of those foods that I tried numerous times throughout my life, but never liked. In fact, you could say I had an aversion to them…they tasted AWFUL! But after about 6 months of eating a healthy plant-based diet, they finally started tasting like food, and now I really like them.

I encourage you to continue trying new and old things on your plant-based journey. As your tastes change, you just might start liking things you used to hate.

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.

Fennel Orange Salad with Beets

Fennel Orange Salad PinThis Fennel Orange Salad with Beets is one of Amelia’s fresh and delicious specialties. She loves to make this cold salad for us on a hot summer day.

Fennel is one of my favorite veggies. It smells like liquorice but it’s a vegetable! How is that even possible! Combined with the orange and beets, this salad smells and tastes like candy!

It’s great all by itself, but it’s even better served over arugula or your favorite leafy greens.

The beets are a nice addition and lend more sweetness to the salad. They take about 45 minutes to boil and need to cool for 10 to 15 minutes before you can peel them so keep that in mind when you’re planning your meal time.

Remember to zest the orange before you peel it. That’s a lot easier than trying to zest a peel.

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.

Carrot Pineapple Salad

Carrot Pineapple Salad PinThis Carrot Pineapple Salad is straight from Amelia’s mom’s kitchen. Amelia loved this recipe as a kid and now I love it, too!

Not only is it full of vibrant colors, it’s deliciously sweet thanks to the pineapple and raisins. In fact, it’s so sweet, you could eat it as dessert. Good luck not eating multiple helpings of it!

Thanks to the walnuts, raisins and pineapple, it does pack quite a few calories at 176 per 3/4 cup. But it also has 168% of your RDV of Vitamin A.

We paired it with our unbelievably delicious Vegan BLT & Avocado Sandwich. The sweetness in the Carrot Pineapple Salad was the perfect compliment to the salty, savory tofu bacon.

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.

Vegan Pasta Salad

Vegan Pasta Salad PinThis Vegan Pasta Salad is oil free, delicious and easy to make. It’s a great summer dish to take on a picnic or to a family gathering.

Pasta salad has always been one of my favorite side dishes. We always used the store-bought mix before going WFPB, but it has lots of additional ingredients, preservatives and uses lots of oil. So Amelia decided to make our own and added some more colorful veggies while she was at it.

Amelia used cauliflower, grape tomatoes, cucumber and black olives, but it would also be great with artichokes, broccoli or your other favorite veggies.

You can use your favorite Italian salad dressing, but we used my oil-free creation, JP’s Italian Salad Dressing. This salad dressing is also easy to make so the hardest part of this recipe is chopping the veggies.

It’s easy to make this recipe gluten-free, too. Just use gluten-free pasta instead of the flour-based rotini that we used.

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.

Tahini Salad Dressing

Tahini Salad Dressing PinThis Tahini Salad Dressing is rich and satisfying. In addition to using it as a salad dressing for your Falafel Salad, you can use it as a condiment on your Veggie Sandwich, Falafel Sandwich or as a dipping sauce for your plain old Vegan Falafel.

Tahini has a peanut buttery texture, but it’s made from sesame seeds. It’s a popular condiment in the Eastern Mediterranean and most of Asia. This recipe mixes it with lemon juice and water to thin it out and give it a tanginess. The Nutritional Yeast gives it a little cheese flavor and some B12.

It’s pretty high in fat, so if you’re trying to lose weight or lower your cholesterol, you should opt for a lower fat dressing like JP’s Italian Salad Dressing, or try No-Tahini Hummus or Salsa instead.

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.

 

Hearty Side Salad

Side Salad PinYou can pair a side salad with just about anything. It’s easy to make and full of nutrients. Skip the iceberg, though. It’s like green water. You’ll need the hearty leaf kinds like kale, chard, mustard greens, spinach, romaine, arugula or lettuce.

Made according to this recipe, it has only 149 calories, but 242% RDV Vitamin A, 190% Vitamin C, 11 grams of fiber and 10 grams of protein. Now that’s a healthy, hearty side salad!

Get creative with your ingredients to keep it new and interesting. Try topping it with some chopped nuts, currants, cherry tomatoes, red onions, avocado, artichoke hearts, mushrooms, cucumber or your other favorite salad mixings.

This recipe uses my favorite JP’s Italian Salad Dressing. It only has 5 calories per serving and tastes delicious!

Hearty Side Salad Cooking Video

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.