5 very complete salads as a single dish

Due to their proportion of raw ingredients, salads are a very quick and simple resource to include vital principles in our diet: they are packed with enzymes, minerals, vitamins and antioxidant compounds.

In addition, they can incorporate food rich in essential nutrients for the construction and repair of tissues and for energy, such as proteins, fats and carbohydrates.

If we know how to choose the ingredients well, a refreshing salad can be so complete and as nutritious as any other main course of the dayso we can eat it as a single dish.

The great advantage of salads is that they are easy to prepare and its elaboration is usually freer and more intuitive than that of any other recipe. If we only use raw ingredients, things are much simplified: we don’t have to wait for cooking time and the kitchen doesn’t fill up with dirty pots.

And if we decide include cooked ingredients (cereals, potatoes, seitan, legumes…), the range of possibilities to create a unique, well-rounded dish is multiplied.

In addition, that great versatility of the salads It makes the task of adapting them much easier. to any season of the year and nutritional need, from an elderly person with a delicate digestion to that of a young person with great physical and mental activity.

Nutritious salads: a good unique dish

If we want to create a nutritious salad we must avoid obsessing with including many proteins; Although it is a single dish, what it is about is that there is an adequate balance between proteins, fats and carbohydrates.

Other important value is quality: Saturated fat, which overloads our body, is not the same as receiving that same energy from sources rich in unsaturated fatty acids such as good olive oil, nuts and seeds, or a delicious avocado.

Quality also has to do with the state and origin of the food: We must prefer fresh food, be careful that it is in a good state of conservation and, if possible, make sure that it comes from organic or biodynamic agriculture.

The necessary proteins of a main dish

The necessary quota of proteins is easy to achieve with ingredients such as quinoa, tofu or chickpeas. With other ingredients, the trick is to combine them so that the essential amino acids that some lack are complemented with those of others that do have them and thus obtain a complete dish that, if it is going to be a single dish, will nourish us well.

Hummus is a good example. of this nutritional rule: chickpea proteins, by complementing the limiting amino acids of sesame (in tahini), make the whole more usable by our body.

We can achieve the same thing when we make a pasta salad with nuts. A good one proportion of raw ingredients is very necessary so that we can receive digestive enzymes, very sensitive to heat, and that help the good digestion of everything we eat. It is then, when the balance, quality and digestibility requirements are met, that a salad can be considered to be very complete.