My Favorite Meal of the Week – Kale Salad and Cauliflower Salad

First of all, I want to say how happy I am to be back blogging (if you don’t know where I was, read this). Spending a week at the beach doing very little besides reading, napping, and eating gave me lots of time to do some thinking and planning for the blog. So get excited for a summer full of yummy recipes.

Ok, now onto today’s post. After nine days of heavy meals, I returned to DC very excited to eat light, healthy summer fruits and vegetables. It also just so happened that for my first night back, I was having a friend over for dinner who was about to leave for a work trip to Afghanistan (and thus would be missing out on all the same fruits and veggies I was craving). So in honor of this, I put together the following spread:

Featured:

– Homemade Pesto (with basil from our garden) and Smashed Tomatoes served on Toasted French Bread

– A Lemon Kale Salad with Poppy Seed Dressing

– A Cauliflower and Garbanzo Bean Salad

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My Favorite Meal of the Week – Mixed Green Salad with Grapefruit Wedges, Goat Cheese, and Candied Pecans

This week’s favorite meal of the week post is all about the grapefruit. I have always liked grapefruits, but I’ve recently remembered why they are so great. They seem to be the only sweet (and relatively inexpensive fruit) right now. In college, they were sometimes the best fruit in the dining hall at this time of year. And right now, they seem to be the best fruit at TJ’s (the berries are too expensive, the apples and oranges are bad, and it’s too early for a lot of other good things).

Today’s meal is a mixed green salad with grapefruit wedges, goat cheese, and candied pecans with a honey dressing. Pretty simple, and nice and light for the summer.

My Favorite Meal of the Week – Spinach Salad

I’m all for the easy salad. Lately, we’ve been eating a lot of them (still making up for our trip to Charleston and in preparation of a vacation where we’ll be spending a lot of time in suits). My newest favorite salad involves spinach, bacon, caramelized onions, apple, blue cheese, candied pecans, and a balsamic dressing. I love the combination of flavors!

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My Favorite Meal of the week – BBQ Chicken, Arugula Salad, and Baked Zucchini

On week nights, I love finding meals that you can quickly pull together when you get home that are healthy and also filling. This meal was something random we just threw together, but for some reason it really hit the spot.

My Favorite Meal of the Week – Farro, Asparagus, and Mint Salad

This week I wanted to share one of my new favorite meals with you. It’s from a cookbook my grandmother gave Dave this summer. All of the different flavors in this salad are really what make it great. Plus it’s pretty easy to make!

My Favorite Meal of the Week – Pretzels and Fall Chopped Salad

This week, I did very little cooking. Between recovering from Thanksgiving and getting the house all prepared for the holidays (see below), I had no energy left to toil in the kitchen. But after finishing all of our holiday decorations this afternoon, I decided to get a little creative for dinner, and it turned out to be one of the best meals of the week.

I’ve been meaning to make my own homemade pretzels (I have a soft spot for the horribly unhealthy ones you can find in malls and airports), and after sitting on the floor for three hours making my own cranberry popcorn garlands today, pretzels sounded like an amazing dinner. And while yes, part of me wanted to just devour the pretzels by themselves (see the next post for recipe), I added in a fall chopped salad (really just so my mom wouldn’t disown me upon reading that I’d only had pretzels for dinner).

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