MY BEST SUMMER SALADS
A Summer Salad Index: Simple, breezy, delicious and at their peak, right now. (Plus a downloadable E-Book!)
Hello!
It’s officially Peak Summer Produce Week here on the Edible Living Newsletter, and I’m coming to you this week with the first of a two-part letter on how to make the most of everything in the market right now.
We just returned from dreamy nights of glamping (at Firelight Camps, near the Finger Lakes)—and by just, I mean five days ago. I’m still finding remnants of camp life in my car and rubbing lotion on bug bites. And by we, I mean the kids and I. András gallantly stayed behind to install air conditioning in our 1880’s home—a retrofit nightmare that I was very happy to avoid altogether, even if it meant a ton of packing and unpacking backpacks, life jackets, paddle boards, and camping gear without his help. We’re all still recovering.
It was great to get away and give up cooking and organizing food for a full four days, which, if I’m honest, takes up a good portion of my energy most days, but especially in summer. Anyone else? Sure, summer cooking is breezy and delicious—but there’s a sort of low-key pressure to hit every farmer’s market, U-pick farm, and roadside farmstand to hunt and gather the best cherries, berries, peaches, plums, and melons at their peak before it’s too late. And once it’s in the house, there’s the low-key pressure to use it all before it spoils in this aggressive summer heat!
There were times when I was on it—at the farmer’s market, making all the gorgeous salads, the first to have that cherry pie baked in peak season, and prosciutto with melon on my summer plates. It felt easy.
Reader, this is not that summer. But it can be for you! To help make that possible, I’m revisiting the best of my summer salads, all in one place for you. These are peak summer, joy-filled platters and plates worth celebrating life with. The kinds of art-on-a-plate I want to greedily horde for myself but am always super proud to serve to friends.
You can find all of these recipes online! But, since many of you have been enjoying my (PDF) recipe packets from my live cooking classes, (Chicken Dinners, Snacks + Sweets, and My Five Best Cookies—all still available to download!), I decided to package these for you too, in a FIVE BEST SUMMER SALADS E-book. This little ‘Zine is epic—we intentionally designed it to feel more like a cookbook—you can download, print, and keep more for making sexy melon salads, plant-forward sides, and main-course salady moments every summer, forever.
Free subscribers can purchase the e-book here. Paid subscribers will get the ‘Zine (PDF) free, below the fold, as a thank you for supporting my work. (Yes—that means if you choose to become a paid subscriber today, you get the packet, plus all access to all my paid content, recipes, travel guides, and full archives going back to my first post on Substack three years ago—that’s at least two cookbooks worth of goodies!)
I’ll be back later this week with a follow-up about using, storing, and saving summer produce, so watch for that in your inbox. Both are keepers. I hope you bookmark and return to again and again all summer and the next, and the next, and the next….
Happy mid-July!
xx
Sarah
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MY BEST SUMMER SALADS
Peaches with Burrata, Proscuitto, and Fresh Herbs
The Best Melon Salad (with Snap Peas and Ricotta)
Whipped Feta with Plum, Tomato, and Avocado Salad