Chopped and Grilled Salad

Oh, it's so good. It just reminds me of my granny's house

I love making food that you can feel good about eating. Hey, y'all, I'm doing a lighter side recipe today, and I gotta tell you, I love roasted vegetables

It's one of my favorite things, and I also like to grill vegetables

So this is a grilled summer vegetable salad, and it's super easy

And you know, it's like a lot of other recipes that we have. If you don't like purple onions, don't put them in

If you like jalapeno peppers instead of banana peppers, use those. You kind of get the idea

I'm taking fresh vegetables that are available in abundance down here in the south in the summertime

and I'm going to put them on my grill for a few minutes. And I'm going to use zucchini. Zucchini is kind of funny

You just don't ever know what a kid's going to eat. And zucchini has been one of the things that my boys

their mouths have just been set for zucchini since I've started putting it in front of them

so I cook a bunch of them. It's really easy to do. I'm going to cut them into planks so they'll lay flat

And I've got a red bell pepper. It took a long time for me to appreciate a bell pepper

And if your kids don't really like peppers and you'd like for them to eat some more fresh vegetables

try the colored peppers. The red and the yellow and the orange are so much sweeter than the green peppers

They're so pretty, too. And you know me, I always want my food to look as good as it tastes

I'm going to cut these into a little bit kind of, not a julienne, but a little bit wider

so they've got some substance to them, and I can get them right down here on the grill

So good and so simple. And banana peppers, I love. My granny, Paul, used to grow a lot of banana peppers

at her house, and that's where I started eating them. And they don't have as much heat as some of the jalapenos

and the red peppers that you find It got a little bit though and just like all the other peppers the heat comes from the seeds So you want to make sure and take the insides out get rid of all those little seeds

Oh, it's so good. It just reminds me of my granny's house. I'm going to grill these as well. I'm going to cut them into two pieces, get rid of my seeds, and get them grilled

Today, y'all, for the base of my salad, I'm using spinach, but arugula would be delicious in this, too

So, you know, arugula's got that firm, peppery taste. My wife, Brooke, loves spinach salads, though

so I love spinach salads, too. I've got a pint of cherry tomatoes

This is the perfect tomato to introduce to your kids because they're so sweet and so small

and they taste a little bit like candy. I'm going to cut these into half so I can put them into my salad

and I'm going to finish it with a little fresh basil and some parsley. You know that I have gotten really big into fresh food

and herbs is the best way that you can kick up any of your recipes that you're doing at the house

Matthew started growing a little basil bush and he's amazed when I go out and pull a leaf off of his plant

and I put it into our food and he gets to eat it. And it's so easy just to go out in the yard

and pick something like rosemary with your chicken or anything like that

Really give it a different homemade fresh taste by growing a little bit of herbs in your own yard

I'm gonna turn these over. These are going to blister a little bit quicker on the outside

Toss my onions. I just want a little bit of marks on these. I'm not going to cook them down super soggy

I want them to remain crispy and fresh. These will probably take maybe 10 minutes or so

and just flip them over about halfway through. We've got our tomatoes done. Let's chop up a little bit of our parsley

Parsley's not going to bring a lot of flavor to it, but it's so pretty and it brings a lot of texture

There's a couple of tricks to pulling this off, but it's really just easy to grab them from the top

make it tight, cut all these bottoms off. If you want to you can go through and pluck all these off but by the time I done chopping it you really can tell the difference so I don waste a lot of time doing that Just a rough chop I really want to taste all the vegetable fresh flavors so I not going to put a real heavy

complicated dressing on our salad today. I'm just going to use a little bit of oil and plain old

vinegar with some salt and pepper. If you want to, you can lay these basils together and roll

them up and cut them into strips, or you could just kind of pull them apart. It's really pretty

to garnish with, too, the tops. Keep your tops intact. See if you take this, you can stick it in

a Bloody Mary. You can put it on top of any of your food as a garnish, but it's so pretty and

tastes delicious. I'm going to chop it up and get these flavors to come out of here

Just going to roll up maybe 12, 15 of these leaves. You know, I meet more and more people that are going to the vegetarian lifestyle. They're staying

away from different proteins for one reason or another. This is a hearty enough salad that would satisfy

your vegetarian friends and also be good enough for you. But if you want to, you can add grilled chicken to this

You can add it to later. So if you have vegetarian friends, this is definitely a dish that would make them happy

This is just gonna take another minute to cook y'all. Okay, y'all, these are perfect

Now I'm gonna take everything off and I'm gonna cut it into bite-sized pieces for us

So good and good for you. I don't have to worry about separating everything on my board

because it's all going into the bowl. Our onions are going to be delicious

My mama loves purple onions. This board is so pretty you can take a picture of it

We've got our roasted red peppers. This is my favorite flavor in this whole salad

are these fresh roasted red peppers with a little bit of this char on them

That is so delicious. And our banana peppers this is going to be our secret weapon It got the punch in our salad I gonna need to chop it all up a little bit

This is fancy cooking, y'all. You can go to a restaurant somewhere

and they make a big deal out of making a roasted, fresh vegetable salad for you

And you and I have done it here at the house in about 10 minutes, and it's so affordable and delicious

And I tell you what, if you can get some of this stuff grow at the house. It's dang near free. We've got our spinach salad as the bottom. We're going in

with all of our vegetables. So delicious. And our grape tomatoes. So we've got reds, we've got greens

we've got purples. We've got a little bit of yellow in the inside of that zucchini

Now that we've got our vegetables in here, y'all, let's dress it. I'm going to use just a little

touch of oil, maybe a tablespoon or so. I'm going to coat everything and we're going to use our red

wine vinegar. A couple of tablespoons of that. Let's get some salt and pepper in here

So good. Now the vegetables are heavy so they're going to go to the bottom of our bowl

So be careful when you dish this up because you want everybody to get a little taste of everything

Once all my leaves are coated, this is so good, and look how pretty it is

So make sure when you dish it up, I'm going to kind of rebuild it the same way

lettuce on the bottom, and then all the good stuff is going to be sitting on the top

I love making food that you can feel good about eating, and this is certainly going to be at the top of your list

It's a fresh roasted summer vegetable salad. I have started to love coming up with delicious lighter recipes

This is just one of the recipes that y'all can find here on Mamas Network, but start here

It is fantastic. Cheers, y'all. Mmm-mm