Cold vegetable salad for summer

[blissful]

It's so HOT here today, in the 90's in Wisconsin.


I made a cold vegetable salad. 2 quarts and 1 2-cup serving.



A combination of cooked and raw veggies which can be eaten cold with dressing (like a tomato dressing or a mustard dressing). Or over lettuce. Or heated and served over rice or chopped potatoes with a sauce (like a red pepper sauce or any veggie sauce), for a warm meal.



Since it is summer we have some things we can eat from the garden. Not enough for canning, drying, or freezing.


Today's cold veggie salad is: turnips, red cabbage, broccoli, zucchini, onions, red peppers, wheat berries, red beans. Colorful.
I didn't add tomatoes since we sometimes use a tomato dressing, and we both will cut up tomatoes if we're in the mood, when we're serving ourselves.


Whatever we make and put in the fridge, is, what we eat. There's some planned overs in the fridge too. Lots of variety.

 

[pepperhead212]

I've been making mostly salads lately, due to the horrible heat, plus all those veggies coming in now! I have to cook some okra (starting to produce fast now) today, if nothing else, blanch what I have to freeze it. I had gazpacho (basically a liquefied salad!) last light, and for breakfast, and still have over 2 qts of it left.

 

[blissful]

Pepperhead, gazpacho is such a great idea this time of year. A savory smoothie in a bowl, almost.



Good luck on the okra. I've never grown it and I think I ate one piece of pickled okra when I was in the southern states one year. A lot of people love that stuff!

 

[GotGarlic]

Several years ago, one cool spring evening, I made a Rachael Ray recipe she called Salsa Stoup (stoup is thicker than soup but thinner than stew). It's basically cooked salsa ingredients. We ate it hot that first night and it was delicious.

The next day was very warm and we had the stoup cold. Wow, that was refreshing on a hot evening! I'm not a big fan of gazpacho because I don't really like raw onions and garlic, but this cooked version was very tasty.

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes...ouble-decker-baked-quesadillas-recipe-2117843

 

[newform10]

It's so HOT here today, in the 90's in Wisconsin.


I made a cold vegetable salad. 2 quarts and 1 2-cup serving.



A combination of cooked and raw veggies which can be eaten cold with dressing (like a tomato dressing or a mustard dressing). Or over lettuce. Or heated and served over rice or chopped potatoes with a sauce (like a red pepper sauce or any veggie sauce), for a warm meal.



Since it is summer we have some things we can eat from the garden. Not enough for canning, drying, or freezing.


Today's cold veggie salad is: turnips, red cabbage, broccoli, zucchini, onions, red peppers, wheat berries, red beans. Colorful.
I didn't add tomatoes since we sometimes use a tomato dressing, and we both will cut up tomatoes if we're in the mood, when we're serving ourselves.


Whatever we make and put in the fridge, is, what we eat. There's some planned overs in the fridge too. Lots of variety.

I think eating lot of vegetables and fruits is good for our healthy in summer.Besides we should drink lot of water also.

 

[Donotuy]

This recipe is also great for other seasons of the year. Should be delisious

 

[larry_stewart]

I didn't add tomatoes since we sometimes use a tomato dressing, and we both will cut up tomatoes if we're in the mood, when we're serving ourselves.

How do you make your Tomato Dressing?
With the amount of tomatoes we had this past year ( and anticipating a good year next year), it would be great to have another use for my tomatoes.

 

[blissful]

How do you make your Tomato Dressing?
With the amount of tomatoes we had this past year ( and anticipating a good year next year), it would be great to have another use for my tomatoes.

This is our most used dressing. As you probably know by now, we don't use oil, so feel free to add tahini or ground nuts for a little richness if that is important to you.
In the summer I use fresh tomatoes, in the winter, tomato 'sauce'..it's just canned tomatoes in sauce form or diced.
1 quart of tomato
1 medium onion
1/2 to 3/4 cup of AC vinegar (or whatever kind you like the most)
garlic powder, onion powder, smoked paprika to taste
about 1/2 t. chili powder
S&P to taste if you wish
I put the onion and vinegar in the blender, then add the dry ingredients, then the tomatoes, blend and put in jars in the fridge to serve from. It lasts a week or so.
We're very adventurous in our topping/dressing our salads. This week we used carrot slaw (carrot apple pineapple), and peach salsa.

 

[larry_stewart]

Thanks, I actually still have a few stragglers from my one tomato plant that I left in the ground and is still producing. The dressing may be my final fresh tomato use of the season.

The tomato variety is 'July 4th"
Theoretically produces first tomato by , you guessed it, July 4th.
Earliest Ive ever gotten one is July 9th, but still a few weeks ahead of the game .
Fruit are about the size of a golf ball 40 - 60 Grams
The one plant has produced 277 ripened fruit
Far exceeding both the amount of tomatoes produced per plant and weight of tomatoes per plant than any other I grow ( I dont include grape varieties, as it would be too tedious to count that many).
Not necessarily the greatest tomato I grow, but due to being the earliest, latest producer, and the highest yield by number and weight, I continue to grow it annually .

***I primarily use it for making gazpacho, so using it in a dressing should work out perfectly ***

PS. Sorry for all the tomato info, but my wife always asks what Im going to do with all the stats I keep on the tomatoes ( and other veggies). Now I can tell her that I actually referred back to them.

 

[blissful]

lol @larry_stewart , we are counters too, both of us. I think it is just the way we are. For instance, 600 beans will make a batch of 7 qts of canned beans. Our most prolific tomatoes are our romas, a determinate, that produces all of them at once. A fabulous year we can 100 qts of thick sauce (half volume), and a poor year only 50 qts of diced or thin sauce (just boiled). The 4 kinds of squash we planted, a measly 3 squash in total, almost not worth it! We're putting in 350 garlic, we're almost done. 300 is our base amount, we use 80 for seed, 200 for eating, and we get requests that far outpaced our current growing.

 

[larry_stewart]

The only squash that do well for me are the ones that I didnt intentionally plant ( compost started)

 

[blissful]

We grew no cherry tomatoes this summer, but we have a pile of straw we use for mulch and THERE a tomato plant popped up. We let it grow. It was cherry tomato, delicious.