We like to build a salad of epic proportions to ensure we are eating variety of healing veggies each day. Salads are one of the easiest ways to incorporate different vegetables into your diet, and by focusing on variety, texture, and flavour, your salad will not only be healthy but delicious too!
When Curt was first diagnosed with MS, we spent a couple weeks reading everything we could on ways to heal and manage the disease more naturally. Thankfully, we remembered seeing a Ted Talk eight months earlier that introduced us to Dr. Terry Wahls. An MS warrior herself, Dr. Wahls reversed her progressive MS through diet and lifestyle, and wrote a book based on her research, The Wahls Protocol, which ultimately became the primary guideline on how we approach our diet today.
The Wahls Protocol focuses on fueling your body with nourishing foods that promote healing: healthy fats, quality meat and organ meat, and lots of veggies with some fruit (9 cups per day, to be exact).
The veggie/fruit quantity is broken down further into:
- 3 cups coloured – sweet potato, berries, beets, carrots, grapefruit, plums, oranges
- 3 cups sulfur-rich – mushrooms, garlic, cabbage, asparagus, onion, turnip, cauliflower, broccoli
- 3 cups leafy greens – kale, spinach, collard greens, parsley, chard, beet greens
We quickly discovered that the easiest way for us to get in our daily veggie quota was by making smoothies and salads. In this post, we’re showing you how you can make a dent in your veg intake with an Epic Salad!
What exactly do we consider to be an Epic Salad?
It needs to have a good mix of vegetables, a ton of flavour, and it’s gotta be loaded!
The Veg:
We like to add a variety of vegetables to our salads for both flavour, colour, and texture. Some of our favourite veggie salad fixins are:
- Thinly-sliced raw Brussels sprouts – Brussels are part of the sulfur category and one of our favourite veggies. We slice them finely using a food processor.
- Shredded raw sweet potato – Orange or purple sweet potatoes are an amazing addition to an epic salad because they’re rich in antioxidants, vitamin C, and vitamin A (great for the eyes!). By adding the sweet potato to your salad raw, you’re also doing your gut health a favour: raw sweet potato is prebiotic, meaning it’s a nutrient source (food) that will help the good bacteria in your gut thrive!
- Shredded raw beets – Much like the sweet potato, shredded raw beets help keep your good gut buds happy, and provide bold colour and some earthy sweetness to your salad,.
- Purple cabbage –Another brightly coloured veg, purple cabbage is also part of the sulfur family and will give your salad some crunchy texture. Like the Brussels sprouts, we thinly slice the cabbage using our food processor.
- Broccoli and cauliflower – Both sulfur rich, we toss some raw broccoli and cauliflower into our food processor and blitz it until they are ‘riced’. We add a few spoonfuls of the broccoli-cauli rice to our salads and don’t even realize it’s there! If you don’t particularly enjoy eating broccoli or cauliflower, this is a great way to get these nutrient-dense foods in.
- Kale – We often use kale as the leafy green base of our salads, mostly because it holds up so well in the fridge. We can make a salad at the beginning of the week and have it for several days without worrying that the greens are going bad. A couple tips for the kale: chop it nice and fine, and massage it with some extra virgin olive oil. Massaging the kale with the oil will help to hydrate all the leaves and soften them a bit, making the kale more enjoyable to eat.
- Roasted veg – Sweet potato, Brussels sprouts, parsnips, broccoli, cauliflower: all these veggies are delicious roasted and will add a different flavour and texture to your salad. If you’re like us and prefer warm meals for dinner, adding roasted vegetables to your epic salad will give it more of a dinner vibe.
- Any other veggies you like!
Flavour:
No one wants to eat a boring salad, so flavour is key. The variety of vegetables will go a long way, but for us, the gold is all in the dressing. If you follow us on Instagram and see our stories, you’ll know we make our Avocado Parsley Dressing a LOT. We make a batch a couple times a week because we put it on everyyyyyything. It is by far our favourite way to dress our salads because this bright green, creamy dressing has so. much. flavour.
Another simple dressing to drizzle onto your plate is a homemade vinaigrette. These can be made quickly with minimal ingredients and will really help take your salad up a notch!
Want a no-dressing salad hack? Drizzle some olive oil over your salad, add a couple forkfuls of homemade sauerkraut along with some of the brine, then toss. The brine will give a tangy, almost vinegary punch (much like any vinaigrette) and you’ll get some probiotic goodness from the ‘kraut and juice that your gut will love!
Load It Up
Chicken. Salmon. Sardines. Beef. Bacon. Nuts. Complete your salad with a little protein. We love adding shredded chicken, leftover salmon, chopped up burger, pastured bacon, or sardines.
A note on sardines: They aren’t as scary as you might think! PLUS they count as organ meat for the Wahls Protocol which is a huge bonus.
If we are having a meatless meal, adding a dollop of hummus or a handful of nuts is a great way to add some protein to your epic salad. Much like our Soaked Oat and Nut Bread, we always prefer to soak our nuts before eating them, then lightly roast them which will add another depth of flavour and a bit of crunch to the salad.
Do you eat salads often? What are your favourite vegetables to add to your plate?
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Tina is successfully optimizing health and healing illness (and helping others do the same) with the help of her husband, Curt. Read Curt & Tina’s inspiring story, “From on our heels to On Our Heals”. Feel free to send them a message.