Green Days: National Salad Month Goes Blue!

Salads just aren’t what the used to be, and that’s a good thing. In fact, May is a month dedicated to salads – it’s National Salad Month, a perfect time to take a close look at your big bowl of greens and make sure it represents this brave new world. Today, the best salads are enlivened with colors and tastes that give them a whole new dimension. What was once just a way to get a serving or two is now an integral part of contemporary cuisine.

You know the advantages: salads are filling, fibrous and interesting to eat, and they incorporate a variety of veggies and fruits with such ease that it makes it almost impossible not to eat from the rainbow. And now, something sweet and delicious has become a new salad staple, as much so as a leaf of romaine or a slice of tomato. That something is wild blueberries. They turn up the volume on taste, turn sides into the main event, and provide superior nutrition at the same time.

Using wild is the key: the smaller size of wild blueberries means more berries in every bite for more taste and concentrated antioxidant power (twice the antioxidant capacity of cultivated blueberries). Nature also provided wild blueberries with a unique and delicious variety of sweet and tangy tastes that the larger cultivated berries simply can’t match, a real advantage when it comes to salads. They are the choice of chefs and home cooks for their versatility and ease of use as an ingredient in any recipe, especially those that start with a bed of greens. (They also make an incomparable vinaigrette. Keep a carafe in the fridge and serve it up on the fly.)

Ready to see what wild blues can do to take your greens from boring to bodacious? May provides the perfect opportunity for a long overdue journey into a new world of salad. Start tossing!

Wild Picks For Salad Month (or Anytime)

These recipes take salad to the height of taste and creativity, and thanks to frozen, every single one is seasonless – even those that call for fresh. Today’s wild blueberries are frozen within 24 hours of harvest at the peak of taste and nutritional goodness and available in the frozen fruit section of supermarkets across the country year round, making them as nutritious and delicious as those just picked – simply thaw and serve.

Wildly Simple 

  • Plating Up, the culinary blog of Maine Food & Lifestyle magazine may call this salad recipe The Blues for its combination of wild blueberries and blue cheese, but it provides nothing but happiness – it’s a perfect example of the superb pairings that can come from wild.
  • Gwenyth Paltrow isn’t just an actress, she’s a foodie of the first order, and in her newsletter goop she points out some of the best in the art of eating, among other things. This Blueberry Salad uses ricotta and cucumber and small, tasty wild blues to achieve minimalist salad perfection.

Blue Twist on the Traditional 

  • You’ll know this Waldorf Salad with Wild Blueberries salad by its celery, lettuce, apples, and walnuts, but its sweet variation is anything but traditional. Wild blues update this simple salad and make it sensational.
  • Caesar Salad with Wild Blueberries is classic, not common. This salad change-up creates the perfect flavor profile with its superfruit enhancement.
                               Salad Sensations
  • The Portland Press Herald pulled out all the stops when they highlighted some mouth-watering wild blue recipes from auspicious origins in Tried True and Blue this past month. It includes a blueberry salad from Five Fifty-Five that combines blueberry gastrique, granola crumble, and Champagne-blueberry vinaigrette – a superb salad experience!
  • Warm Asian Beef Salad with Wild Blueberries gives an Eastern twist to greens and puts so-called side dishes to shame.

Indulge In More Blue! WildBlueberries.com has plenty of ideas for using frozen fresh wild blueberries in salads, desserts, drinks and more.

There’s Something About Vinaigrette

Wild Blueberries Kick Up Greens & More 

There’s something about vinaigrette – specifically, blueberry vinaigrette – that sends many recipe seekers to Wild About Health. In fact, there are as many of us searching for this twist on vinaigrette as there are searching for pie or cobbler.

It seems blueberry vinaigrette has come out of hiding. It’s been discovered by discriminating cooks for its unexpectedness and its perfect balance of sharpness and subtlety that perks up any dish. It’s lively, light, and flavorful, and creates an ideal flavor profile for proteins and vegetables that goes beyond oil and vinegar. It also provides the perfect opportunity to add something unique to a meal with a knowing nod to a wild, regional food.

While “blueberry vinaigrette” may be the shorthand, it’s the “wild” that makes this vinaigrette shine. Wild provides the intense flavor, and it’s unsurpassed when it comes to health. Wild is also the chef’s choice when it comes to any recipe. (Go ahead and compare wild vs. cultivated and see.)

Vinaigrette Unleashed 

Need more reasons to love vinaigrette? You got it. There’s no end to vinaigrette’s versatility when you add the flavor of wild blueberry – it whips the drab out of a dish faster than your can answer the question, “What’s that exquisite flavor?” Here are a few ideas to put this taste accomplice to work:

  • Dress your greens. For salads, wild blueberry vinaigrette adds natural flavor and zing.
  • Use it as marinade. Think fish and chicken. Keep it brief for fish – 15-30 minutes, so the acidity does not “cook” the fish.
  • Use it on vegetables – add wild blueberry vinaigrette while cooking, or toss veggies in a small amount before serving for a subtle wild blue flavor.
  • Dip your bread. Dipping crusty bread in EVOO is a popular table activity – using wild blueberry vinaigrette is a great alternative. Provide a bit for your focaccia in a selection of shallow dishes.
  • Drizzle it – over a chicken or turkey sandwich for is slimmer, superior alternative to fattier condiments, and as the perfect complement to this protein, courtesy of that wild blue flavor.

Wild Blueberry Vinaigrette

Need the ultimate recipe? Look no further. Easy assembly and storage means you can take any meal from snoozy to snazzy with this Wild Blueberry Vinaigrette recipe from WildBlueberries.com.  See below.

Need More Salad?

For something new, try this Baby Spinach Salad with Warm Wild Mushroom and Blueberry Vinaigrette. Don’t just stop at the mushrooms when it comes to wild – choose wild for the blueberries, too. (Go ahead and get them frozen, they’re as delicious and nutritious as fresh.)

Or, toss together these palate-pleasing salad options for a new twist on greens that will prove more than just an entrée sidekick:

Wild Blueberries with Roquefort, Celery and Cumberland Sauce

Savory Salad with Goat Cheese and Wild Blueberry Sauce

Rainbow Superfood Salad with Wild Blueberry and Balsamic

May is National Salad Month

Rediscover a Side with Style
Caprese - 16 by L. Marie, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  L. Marie 

Of all the outrageous food holidays (National Catfish Month? National Root Beer Float Day?), a month devoted to salads may seem on the surface to be the most unnecessary. We are more than versed in the cafeteria or grocery store salad bar, after all. Salads are a ubiquitous side dish, and they are even a popular fast food option. But if you are doing your level best to get your fruit and veggie servings every day, putting the spotlight on the salad may be just what you need to raise your servings quotient and rediscover what salad has to offer.

The Salad Advantage

Besides incorporating large amounts of veggies and fruit, salads arrive on the scene with their own built-in advantages. They are filling and fibrous, they are interesting to eat, and they provide variety that makes it almost impossible not to eat from the rainbow. Salads also come with their own deep history that makes them a surprisingly good fit as comfort food – fix a Cobb salad, a Waldorf salad or a little lime Jell-O and you’re instantly transported to the early 20th century. What’s more, salads deliver on a budget: salad-making is the stone soup of the American kitchen due to their uncanny ability to incorporate a fridge’s odds and ends and stretch a single chicken thigh or a sole carrot into a eight-serving dish.

So why not a month that pays homage to the ultimate vegetable delivery system? This May, get creative and make salad the meal, or decide that a salad dish will accompany every dinner plate. You might even take the opportunity to plan a salad-centric garden by experimenting with interesting greens that will inspire your salad days in the months to come.

In May, It’s Easy Being Green

Whether your penchant is to toss or to spin, here are three basic principles to live by as you embark on a month devoted to a pastiche of produce.

Know your greens. If you are still rocking the iceberg, it’s time to dump the colorless crunch and embrace dark leafies. Romaine or spinach provide the deep colors that indicate they are a food full of powerful antioxidants, for instance. You can also opt for no greens at all. Europeans are notorious for salads that use tomatoes or bell peppers as the under layer – tomato and mozzarella caprese salad is a beloved meal accompaniment, no greens necessary.

Make your own dressing. It’s a well-known salad trap: you start with a dish of healthy, and then ruin a good thing with fattening salad dressing. The solution? Forgo the supermarket bottles and take matters into your own hands so you have full control over your ingredients. Opt for basic vinaigrette, or make your own Russian by using low-fat yogurt. HuffPost’s Kitchen Daily covers the spread of DIY dressing, and Real Simple’s Simplystated.com has 6 Ridiculously Easy Homemade Salad Dressings including Creamy Tarragon and Avocado and a simple Thousand Island that kids will love.

Eat what you love. Silly for avocados? Think wild blueberries are the bomb? Can’t resist pasta? They are all ingredients that make salad sensational. If your salad seems a little dull, include a favorite topping that makes it delectable, whether it’s homemade croutons like these corn bread croutons that add killer crunch, or a sprinkle of parmesan. And don’t stint on the protein. Chicken, eggs or tofu can make a side into an instant meal. A part of using high-calorie foods moderately, decide to opt for the exciting flavor or olives instead of bacon, for example, and if you are cutting calories, a dash of Kosher salt might be enough to make dull different.

Salad Sensational

Cooking Light has 5-Ingredient Salads that run the gamut from Chicken and Spring Greens with Açai Dressing to Steak Salad with Creamy Horseradish Dressing.

Wild blueberries shine in salad! Blues add glorious, nutritious color that instantly upgrades a salad’s flavor profile. Case in point, this Duck, Spinach and Goat Cheese Salad with Savory Wild Blueberry Sauce. Quinoa Salad with Wild Blueberries is a delicious dish that uses zucchini and Havarti cheese to create a superior flavor mix with wild blues.