I love a gorgeous salad in summer. Fresh and crisp, they are super nutritious, easy to put together and leftovers make a great meal the next day (just don’t add the dressing until you serve it). The key is to include a variety of tastes and textures and enough protein to make it a meal. This Grilled Chicken & Chickpea Kale Salad is a fantastic example, with nearly 50 grams of protein!
I chose it because it highlights the humble radish and Ontario-grown radishes are abundant now. I recently received a beautiful bunch of French breakfast radishes in my local food box and this salad was their destiny. That said, salads make great canvasses for all manner of veggies. No radishes on hand? Just use whatever you do have. As long as it’s colourful and crunchy, you can’t go wrong!
And I encourage you to shop your local Farmers’ Market where you will find a variety of stunning radishes that will transform every salad into a work of art!
Sign up to my newsletter today to receive the recipe for my Grilled Chicken & Chickpea Kale Salad and read on for more about what’s ravishing about radishes!
Grilled Chicken & Chickpea Kale Salad…Deconstructed
While the recipe calls for baby kale, any leafy greens work well here. The recipe notes suggest spinach, baby chard and baby arugula as substitutions as they are easy to find at your grocery store. At Farmers’ Markets, however, you can often find some more unusual greens like watercress, mache, dandelion, mizuna, tat soi, curly endive or mustard greens. And of course you can use radish greens here, too, if they are nice and fresh. The French breakfast radishes I used in this salad had really lovely greens attached (see photo at right) so I included those. But as radishes have a peppery taste, it is good to balance things out with mellower greens as well, like a nice buttery, crunchy Bibb lettuce. So feel free to mix things up!
Ravishing Radishes
Radishes come in an array of sizes, shapes and colours, as the photo at left illustrates. And as different vitamins and nutrients are associated with different colours of food, it’s important to make your food colourful. Radishes are super-nutritious and loaded with essential vitamins and minerals and fibre. They are a member of the cruciferous vegetable family (like cauliflower and kale), known to have numerous health benefits due to the presence of glucosilonates. Glucosilonates are compounds which fight oxidative stress and protect cells by reducing free radical damage. This not only helps protect your cardiovascular system, it may also reduce your risk of cancer.
I’m a big fan of radishes and have come across some interesting ones in my time, including the pink-hued winter radish called China Rose. But a favourite this time of year is watermelon radish. Don’t be put off by it’s drab exterior, because on the inside you’ll find a vibrant pink with a green hue at the edge, just like watermelon. A few slices of these will make any salad more ravishing!
I hope you enjoy this Grilled Chicken & Chickpea Kale Salad as much as I do. Sign up here for the recipe and feel free to share it with your family and friends!