Crunchy Ranch Salad with Crispy Chicken
Easy summer meals & a bonus recipe
I love being associated with food memories. Whether I taught you how to make a perfectly chopped salad or you served bite-size cupcakes as your wedding cake, I LOVE being a part of it. These memories can be big or small, but all of them (I hope!) are delicious.
So here’s another reason I hope you’ll think of me in the kitchen: turning your leftovers into salads. This can transform any vegetable into something truly amazing, while giving you a quick, nourishing meal that makes space in your fridge. It’s a two-in-one! I actually reverse-engineered one of this week’s meals to give you the same leftovers I had to make breakfast the next day. I hope you love it just as much as I did—and join me in making leftover salads a thing.
The rest of the menu highlights gorgeous seasonal produce and gives you the perfect bite of crunchy, refreshing salad that tastes best this time of year when temperatures are at their highest.
Here’s what we’re cooking this week:
Crunchy Ranch Salad with Crispy Chicken
Steamed Veggies & Crispy Salmon (plus Leftovers Salad)
Corn & Tomato One-Pot Pasta
Crunchy Ranch Salad with Crispy Chicken
Once you learn how to make crispy chicken, you can use it for just about anything. Adi frequently makes chicken schnitzel with a perfectly crunchy exterior and tender chicken, which is just as good eaten on top of this gorgeous salad as it is sneaking a bite over the stove. We normally pan-fry the schnitzel, but I’ve included instructions for airfrying, too—it’s a bit more hands-off, which is always a win on a weeknight. It’s also great with Green Goddess.
Steamed Veggies & Crispy Salmon
Plus Leftovers Salad!
I’ve been making salmon this way ever since Geoffrey Zakarian came to my house and showed me how. It’s so perfectly crispy and is pretty hands off once you get it in the pan. And my kids love it! With all three pillars of the perfect meal (vegetables, grain, protein), this has become our go-to summer dinner. (If you want a really easy fish recipe, here’s a sheetpan meal for you!)
As a bonus, you also get the recipe for a salad I would happily eat every day, made with the leftover veggies from the night before. Once you start thinking about steamed vegetables as salad ingredients, your whole world will change.
Corn & Tomato One-Pot Summer Pasta
If you’ve been to the market (or even the grocery store) recently, I’m sure you’ve seen piles of gorgeous summer corn and juicy tomatoes. I could make a corn salad every day, but sometimes I need to mix things up a bit. This one-pot pasta lets whatever pasta shape you choose absorb all the delicious summer flavors while you sit back and relax.
