Serious Eats
10 No-Labor Labor Day Salads
Each day this week we'll round up our favorite no-to-minimal-labor recipes for your Labor Day festivities this weekend. Yesterday we shared 10 appetizers, and today it's salad time. These are easy-peasy—not much work beyond chopping and tossing a few ingredients together.
- Greek Salad Skewers: Fresh, flavorful, pretty, and they require no heating implement whatsoever. Plus: It's food on a stick. Who doesn't love food on a stick?
- Broccoli Salad with Bacon, Chives, and Tomato: Bacon is a natural pairing with broccoli, and in this Jamie Oliver recipe, you blanch the broccoli first for a minute to give it that bright, just-barely crunchiness.
- Jambon-Wrapped Grilled Endive: This isn't technically a salad, but does involve endive.
- Tarragon Crab Salad: You can use a good-quality canned crab here instead of dealing with the steaming and ripping-apart of fresh ones. That said, you could probably find a fishmonger that will do all that work for you—but the canned variety really does work in a pinch.
- Asian-Mediterranean Cucumber Slaw Salad: This slaw is inspired as much by Japan as Greece. It marinates in soy sauce and white vinegar, with some hummus thrown into the equation.
- Potato Salad with Green and White Beans: Though made of fairly humdrum ingredients, this salad doesn't bore. Nor does it turn mushy, as 'tato salads are wont to do.
- Gorgonzola Tomato Salad: Since it's tomato season, you should really eat as many tomatoes as possible, and keep it simple. Here they're combined with gorgonzola, cabbage, and vinaigrette.
- Easy Fruit Salad: You can mix and match whatever fruit is in season, but the key is the julienned mint.
- Avocado Grapefruit Salad with Balsamic Vinaigrette: The name says it all—yup, that's it.
- Red Cabbage, Tangerine, and Bacon Salad with Bacon Vinaigrette: This salad takes the wonderful pairing of red cabbage and citrus and adds bacon in two ways: bacon itself, and bacon grease for the dressing.
