Fresh Salads With Ingredients From my Garden

For the last few months I’ve been doing “meal prep“. What that means in simple terms is that for at least 5 days of the week, when I’m not “away”, two of my daily meals are prepped in advance. I prefer to mix things up a bit when it comes to my evening meal, but being fairly consistent about breakfast and lunch makes things quite a bit simpler.

So most mornings breakfast is overnight oats. Earlier this summer I was able to use strawberries from my greenhouse as the fruit in the overnight oats, but the strawberry season is finished now. So instead of strawberries I’m now getting lovely fresh raspberries from my garden which I can combine with blackberries from either my garden or the local hedgerows. And of course blackberries go nicely with apple in so many things (not just crumble!). When the fresh fruit runs out I’ll revert to using dried fruit, which I get from a company in County Limerick.

For the salads I’ve been able to get my own lettuce and kale from the raised beds outside. Fresh from the garden will trump anything from a shop! I’ve also been able to get a reasonable amount of cucumber and tomatoes from the greenhouse. The tomatoes this year haven’t done particularly well, but they haven’t been a total failure either.

A caprese salad needs good quality ingredients to really pop and fresh tomatoes make a massive difference! I’ve also been lucky enough to get my hands on some really nice olive oil courtesy of a Brazilian friend, which combined nicely with the other ingredients like Achill Island seasalt and lovely balsamic vinegar from Spain.

Today’s lunch, for example, used kale as its main ingredient which was combined with fresh tomato from the greenhouse, cucumber (also from the greenhouse) and carrot and a bit of pepper. The dressing was quite spicy and really worked nicely with the fairly strong flavour of the kale.

Being able to get more salad ingredients from the garden would be ideal, but I’ve also realised that some things require more TLC than I really give them, while others seem to flourish when I leave them alone…