Is there anything more summery than a super colourful and fresh salad?

Today’s recipe is from Thug Kitchen 101 cookbook. You know I love Mexican food so having all the flavours of a delicious taco in the form of a salad is a perfect way to go!

This was one of the most colourful salads I’ve ever made – almost had every colour of the rainbow. You really can’t beat the freshness of this many vegetables. They provide so much texture, flavour and nutrition to the salad. The recipe says you can pretty much use whatever vegetables you have on hand, here’s what I used: carrot, tomato, bell pepper, avocado. There is also some green onion which adds an extra bite and mild onion flavour.

For the ‘taco’ component of the salad, you can either have quinoa taco mix which is another recipe in this cookbook or just use black beans. I actually have made that taco mix in the past (link here) but today I wanted the quicker option so I went with the canned beans. This was an easy way to get some protein into the salad which helps fill you up.

The last part to this recipe is the dressing. It has a jalapeno-cilantro dressing which is super bright and has a little spice. It was very easy to make, using a blender (or food processor), and it was creamy and vibrant green.

If you wanted to make this salad non-vegan, you could definitely add some sour cream or cheese on top. But honestly, I didn’t even feel like I needed it. This was so good how it was.

I made one large salad and it was a great meal. The dressing coated everything really well and tasted amazing. Also, just look at this closeup of the salad, that could almost be the background picture on your phone. Such a thing of beauty!