We’ll eat a salad most days out of the year. Whether it’s an easy fall salad recipe like a delicious roasted squash panzanella or a BBQ salad perfect for a quick summer dinner idea, we see salad as the perfect blank canvas for our favorite produce and other add-ins. Nothing quite whets our appetites for crisp raw vegetables like the first spring days at the farmers' market that make the perfect base to whip up the freshest spring salad recipes.
Packed with raw and lightly cooked vegetables, these recipes go hard on flavor while maintaining the tender crunch and vibrant greens and pinks of the season’s best. Some of them even feature thinly sliced skirt steak, oil-packed tuna and other proteins to turn your salad into a full meal. Not too big on greens? Some of these are loaded with grains, beans and potatoes, which we freshen up with plenty of herbs and citrus.
Many of these salads work brilliantly for meal prep, especially if you get proteins, dressings and other components ready in advance. Grains and heartier veg like carrots and broccolini will also hold up well in the fridge. So whether you’re in search of a light make-ahead meal or the perfect side to your family spring dinner, these healthy salads will help get those much-needed veggies in as the days begin to warm up (sunshine, here we come!).
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Bright Radish Salad
Mike Garten
Love radishes? Make an entire salad out of them. We like to tame their bite with honey and sweet Meyer lemon juice.
We confess: we’ll eat a classic Cobb pretty much any time of year, even in the dead of winter. But when springtime rolls around, this bacon-and-cheese vehicle — er, we mean, salad — is at the front of our minds.
Samantha (she/her) is an Assistant Editor in the Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen, where she writes about tasty recipes, must-try food products and top-tested secrets for home cooking success. She has taste-tasted hundreds of products and recipes since joining GH in 2020 (tough job!). A graduate of Fordham University, she considers the kitchen to be her happiest place.