March can be a tricky month to create a salad menu, as spring ingredients are not yet available in many areas and winter produce is getting a bit boring. These five recipes bridge the seasonal gap and can easily freshen up your salad selection.
Photograph courtesy of California Milk Advisory Board
Farro Beet Salad
Cooked beets turn the farro bright red, making this grain salad a colorful addition to a March menu. Although beets are a wintry vegetable, there are hints of spring in the minty citrus vinaigrette and fresh notes from the creamy white cheese.
Dandelion, Kale and Orange Salad with Spice-Roasted Walnuts
Chef Joanne Weir specs the Cara Cara orange for this recipe—a red-fleshed navel orange that looks like a cross between a blood orange and grapefruit. If these are hard to come by, another orange variety can be substituted. The goal here is to provide a sweet, juicy counterpoint to the slightly bitter dandelion greens.
New Mexican flavors infuse this meaty salad. The grass-fed striploin is seasoned with a Chimayo chile rub before it’s cooked sous vide style. The salad is completed with baby lettuce leaves, pine nuts goat cheese, Persian cucumber, radishes, avocado, grapefruit and grape tomatoes, all dressed with a sherry vinaigrette.
Photograph courtesy of The Cafe at Glen Ellyn Public Library
Asian Medley Salad with Shrimp and Sesame-Ginger Vinaigrette
The Glen Ellyn Public Library boasts its own cafe, where visitors can enjoy salads, sandwiches, snacks and more. For this popular Asian-inspired salad, shrimp, sugar snaps, carrots, radishes and purple and green cabbage make a colorful base for a toasted sesame seed vinaigrette.
Warm Spinach Salad with Triple Berry Granola Garam Masala Brittle
A chickpea and granola brittle spiced with garam masala elevates this spinach salad to the next level. It makes for a unique way to use granola in a savory application. Chef Dan Snowden of Pizza Lobo also prepares a tofu “paneer” to add more Indian flair to the recipe.
The final weeks of this school year have been turbulent at dozens of college campuses across the country, driven by differing views of the Israel-Hamas war.