I honestly hate salads that are just lettuce and dressing. If I’m gonna eat salad, I want it to be more exciting and have lots going on. Between this current cookbook (love real food), my last cookbook (yum & yummer) and my own recipes, I have made quite a few delicious salads. You can check out the whole collection here. Good salads require nice ingredients and flavourful dressings. This salad today checked both of those requirements.

I’ll start with the salad ingredient. The recipe calls for arugula but I subbed spinach for personal preference. On top of that, it has nicely roasted sweet potato, bell pepper and broccoli. I roasted those in the morning so that I could just assemble everything quickly for dinner time. There are several other toppings too – sun-dried tomatoes, avocado, feta cheese, pepitas – which add so much extra colour and texture.

I know it might sound like a lot of different ingredients but they all work well together. If you wanted to make it a little simpler, you could skip the roasted veggies and just do greens with the other toppings. I think that would be tasty too.

The dressing is what brings everything together. It’s a little smokey from the chipotle sauce but the balsamic helps to balance it out with some sweetness and acidity.

This salad was a great side for dinner but it would be an awesome light lunch too. You could even add some extra protein (cooked chicken, edamame) to make it more filling.