30 Best Easy Healthy Salads — The Green Salad That Held Its Place Beside the Trout

Mamma called Tuesday morning at 10 AM, as she always does, as she has done since she had a phone of her own in 1953. She wanted to know what I was making for dinner. The question matters to her in a way that I now understand at sixty-eight in a way I did not understand at thirty. The asking is the love. The answering is the love. The conversation is the bridge across the days. We talked for nineteen minutes. Mamma is ninety. The phone calls are precious and finite. I do not waste them. Anna sent photos from Minneapolis — the kids in their school uniforms, David's new bookshelf, the dog (their dog, not mine; their dog is named Cooper, and Cooper is a Bernese mountain dog who weighs more than Anna and who is, by all accounts, the most relaxed dog in the upper Midwest). I printed three of the photos and put them on the fridge. The fridge holds the family that is not currently in the kitchen. Elsa called from Voyageurs. She had a sighting of a wolf — a single gray adult crossing a frozen bay at dawn, fifty yards from her cabin. She had a sighting of a moose two days later. She is happy in the woods. I am glad someone in this family is happy in the woods. I have always loved Lake Superior, but the deeper woods are not for me. Elsa is for the deeper woods. The match is right. I cooked Grilled lake trout this week. Trout from the marina, brushed with butter and lemon, grilled over coals on the back deck. Served with grilled lemons and a green salad. Damiano Thursday: a young father came in with two small children. He had not eaten in a day. The children had crackers from a bus station. I gave them three bowls each. They ate without speaking. The father wept silently while he ate. I pretended not to notice. Scandinavian decorum, applied with care. After he left, Gerald and I stood at the pot for a long minute. We did not speak. We knew what we had seen. The pot stayed warm. I miss Erik. I have been missing Erik more than I anticipated. I knew I would miss him, but I had not realized how often the missing would surface — in small specific moments, like noticing the wood pile is low and remembering that he used to chop it for me, or looking at the calendar and seeing the Sunday and knowing he is not coming for dinner. Erik was the closest person to me in space and time. The space and time are now not closed by anyone in particular. The kids fill the gap as they can. The gap is still a gap. It is enough. It has to be. And on a morning like this, with the lake doing what the lake does and the dog at my feet and the bread on the counter and the kitchen warm enough to live in, it is. The Kenwood neighborhood has aged with me. The Bergmans next door (who were a young couple with three kids when Paul and I moved in) are now grandparents themselves; the Larsons across the street have moved to a smaller place; the Andersons three doors down passed away in 2017 and 2019 respectively. The block has filled in with younger families that I am too tired to fully meet. I wave from the porch. They wave back. The wave is the relationship. It is enough.

The trout deserved a proper companion, and it got one — nothing fussy, just a clean green salad with good lemon and a little olive oil, the kind of thing that sits quietly on the plate and lets the fish do its work. After a week that asked a great deal of me — the phone call with Mamma, the young father at Damiano, the low wood pile and the Sunday without Erik — I did not want complexity on the plate. I wanted the kind of salad that knows its place: cool, bright, honest, and done in the time it takes the coals to settle.

30 Best Easy Healthy Salads — Classic Lemon Green Salad

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 0 min | Total Time: 10 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

• 5 oz mixed baby greens (arugula, spinach, or butter lettuce)
• 1 small English cucumber, thinly sliced
• 1/2 cup thinly sliced celery
• 1/4 cup thinly sliced radishes
• 1/4 cup fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves
• 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (about 1 lemon)
• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• 1 small garlic clove, finely grated
• 1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
• 1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• Optional: 2 tablespoons toasted sunflower seeds or slivered almonds

Instructions

1. Make the vinaigrette. In a small bowl or jar, whisk together the olive oil, lemon juice, Dijon mustard, grated garlic, salt, and pepper until emulsified. Taste and adjust lemon or salt as needed.
2. Prep the vegetables. Rinse and thoroughly dry the greens — a salad spinner works well here. Slice the cucumber, celery, and radishes thin so they stay delicate alongside the greens.
3. Combine. In a large bowl, combine the greens, cucumber, celery, radishes, and parsley leaves. Do not dress the salad until just before serving.
4. Dress and toss. Drizzle the vinaigrette over the salad and toss gently with tongs or clean hands until every leaf is lightly coated. Do not overdress — the greens should glisten, not swim.
5. Finish and serve. Transfer to a serving bowl or individual plates. Scatter toasted seeds or almonds over the top if using. Serve immediately alongside grilled fish, roasted chicken, or any simply prepared main.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 115 | Protein: 2g | Fat: 10g | Carbs: 5g | Fiber: 2g | Sodium: 160mg