First things first: I use frozen cherries in my cherry smoothies. Listen, I love fresh cherries as much as the next gal, but no way am I pitting cherries every morning to feed my raging smoothie habit. Also, have y’all seen how expensive cherries are?! Right now, they are $8.59 a pound at my local grocery store. Frozen, already-pitted cherries, however, are $7.99 for two pounds. I usually turn to Costco for my cherry needs, though, because you can get a five-pound bag for under $15.
Am I enjoying a luscious cherry smoothie as I write this? Yes, indeed I am.
Okay! It is Monday and we are already speaking of food, so I will go ahead and ask that you please do me a favor and make my favorite honey chipotle summer salad this week. It is my favorite salad of all time. At least, my favorite SUMMER salad of all time (wouldn’t want to make my favorite fall salad jealous). When I make it for myself and my husband, I make a double portion so I can feast on leftovers for lunch all week.
And vegetarians! Please do not look away just because this recipe includes chicken! The chicken is incidental to the spectacularity of the salad. What you need is anything that can be marinated and cooked, so that you can bask in the spicy sweet richness of the sauce, which I use as a second dressing.
This salad is an amalgam of things, so please bear with me. First, I marinate my chicken (or WHATEVER) in the marinade from this recipe. Then I throw it in the oven at 450 until the chicken is cooked and/or the sauce is bubbly and caramelized.
At some point in the preparation process, I make crispy quinoa, black beans, and a dressing. Sometimes I make the chili lime dressing from this recipe, which is simple and slightly sweet. More recently, I am enamored of this cilantro vinaigrette, which is such a fabulous creamy contrast to the chipotle sauce. I also wash copious amounts of lettuce (I store it in my salad spinner in the fridge with a paper towel on top; it keeps for a few days) and prepare other veggies (usually bell peppers, red onion, avocado, corn, and tomatoes for people who like that kind of thing). (I wrap shucked, washed ears of corn in damp towels and microwave them for three minutes. Then I scrape off the kernels into a bowl and put them in the fridge so they cool off before I put them on the salad.) Then I throw everything together and drizzle with some of the caramelized chipotle sauce. It is a rich, garlicky, spicy-sweet addition that I imagine is similar in some ways to chili crisp (which I have never tried), and it takes the salad to a whole other level.
Now that I have fully salad badgered you, let us turn to dinners.
Hmm. I need some simple and flexible things for this week’s meal plan because it is a call week.
Dinners for the Week of June 10-June 17
- Some Sort of Chicken and Asparagus: Depending on the weather, we could grill this or roast it in the oven.
- Ground Beef Tacos: Easy, plus I have been making the taco meat in the crockpot lately, so it’s very hands-off and can be prepped in advance.
- Oven Baked Pork Chops with Broccoli: I can prep everything ahead of time and throw the pork chops in the oven when my husband leaves the hospital.
- Panang Curry: My husband LOVED this the last time I made it, so maybe I will make it for him on Sunday? (It was highly successful on the stovetop, by the way. I used an entire tin of curry paste and added in about two cups of chicken stock, which wasn’t part of the original recipe.)
- Chickpea Bowls: It’s been awhile since this has been on the docket, and it’s always a good option. As usual, I will probably make a chicken breast for my husband to slice into his bowl, and I will add tons of sliced bell peppers to the sauce to amp up the veggie factor.
That seems like enough options to keep me busy! What are you planning to eat this week? (Please say honey chipotle summer salad.)
The salad looks delicious to me. Caramelized chipotle sauce! Yes please, sign me up. I also like the idea of chicken prepared simply with asparagus. Dare I say yum?
Right?! Give me caramelized chipotle sauce any day.
Why don’t more people know about storing veggies in a bag with a paper towel trick? This one hack will get you 200% more time with salad greens and crunchy vegetables!!
It definitely helps!
That salad looks amazing and gorgeous! That is my kind of meal! I like a high toppings to greens ratio. And this post reminds me to make the chickpea bowl next week when I am not traveling. Personal question for you that you can ignore. Does that dish give you gas? I was loving the chickpea curry salad but I got some bloated and gassy! Maybe a cooked chickpea dish wouldn’t do that?
I travel this week so I don’t have much planned. I make a ground turkey-based 3-bean chili last night in the instant pot. On Thursday when I am back I plan to make burgers with asparagus and corn (we make the corn in the instant pot – it’s so easy! So that might be something to try if you want to give your IP a shot).
Yes, high toppings to greens ratio! Even though I love lettuce, I really enjoy packing on the toppings.
Some people in our household have a very gassy reaction to chickpeas, and others don’t. I think cooked chickpeas have less of an effect, though — this is based on a recent experience with homemade hummus.
I also do the paper towel trick and agree it works wonders (I do this with herbs, too; I will put a paper towel underneath AND on top of herbs in a covered container and they can keep for well over a week this way).
Both those sauces sound amazing; we LOVE cilantro and they both call for cilantro. I will be trying this salad ❤
All the cilantro!!!!
Do you have a link for the salad? I missed it, if you provided one… ? Thanks!
Hi Anne! It’s not really a “salad” per se, just a jumble of recipes I’ve cobbled together.
Marinade from this recipe: https://www.howsweeteats.com/2014/01/honey-chipotle-chicken-bowls/
Dressing from this recipe: https://pinchofyum.com/5-ingredient-cilantro-vinaigrette
And then I just throw in whatever veggies sound good!
I use frozen fruit in my smoothies, too! It’s just more economical, especially in the winters here where fruit is just flown in from all over and so pricey.
That salad looks amazing! My daughter is just getting “in” to salads and I bet she’d love it. Adding to the list once we get through school. Thanks!
Yes, frozen fruit is so much less expensive. And it’s really good quality, too!
Hope you and your daughter both love the salad.
Come make salads for me. I wish you were my neighbor.
I wish we were neighbors, too! I would have you over for all sorts of salads. 🙂
You’re the best neighbor ever.
Well you KNOW I love your fall salad, and so I think I will incorporate this one too! Wow wow WOW that looks good. Mmmm baby. Come to mama.
I assumed it was frozen cherries! I mean, what kind of time does a person have to have to pit cherries every damn day? No thank you sir. I buy the big bags from Costco and I use them to make cherry pies (not for me, blergh, pie). I love frozen fruit and I use it for all manner of things including jam and baking. I just cannot imagine using fresh fruit for those purposes!
Tomorrow is a salad dinner and I think I will try this honey chipotle, but in true Nicole fashion I will probably just throw everything I’ve got at it and not really follow the recipe because THAT IS HOW I ROLL. But black beans and honey chipotle sound really good, so I’m going to at least do that. Tonight we are having pasta salad, and then I think I’ve got a stir fry planned and maybe a pasta dish, we have a party on Friday and then Father’s Day on Sunday, on which I’ll probably force Rob to barbeque his own steak or something. BUT THERE WILL BE SALAD, BET ON IT.
Hmm…maybe I’ll see if he wants a cherry pie for Father’s Day! Full circle moment.
You are definitely my people if you respond to a salad with “come to mama.” Lol. My thoughts exactly.
I hope you and your family enjoy the honey chipotle! And lol to forcing Rob to grill his own steak. ONE CAN ONLY DO SO MUCH, NICOLE. You are already contemplating a pie you won’t eat. Someone else can deal with the steak. 😉
DAMN that salad sounds good, except I’m not sure if our corn is good enough yet.
I am going to town on the fresh cherries right now. I always think frozen cherries won’t blend well, is that not right? Because I would murder a cherry smoothie.
We’ve had asparagus multiple times already, and Matt keeps making a chili-lime marinade with cilantro for steak and I am not sure I will ever get tired of it.
Eve and I are on our own this week, and I’m working the next three days, so dinner will probably not be terribly impressive. I have ground beef that I will probably make into vietnamese caramelized pork bowls except not pork. And then we’ll eat it for three days.
So…. you are correct in that a cherry doesn’t blend perfectly. There are often some scraps of cherry skin in my smoothie, but I don’t mind them. And it definitely depends on how vigorously I blend the smoothie, too — and on how many cherries are in it. Sometimes I only make the smoothie with half a cup of cherries and that gets MUCH smoother than when I use a full cup.
A chili lime steak marinade sounds spectacular. Maybe I will try to figure something like that out for my husband this weekend?
Well, yum! That salad does sound delicious. And, I’ve made that recipe for chickpea bowls- it’s really good (and I love the way the recipe is written.) I can’t remember if I’ve ever made panang curry, but it sounds like something my family would love. I’m glad you’re back with your “dinners this week” posts!
The chickpea bowls are SO good. But it’s so funny because I cannot stand the way it’s written! I wrote an entire blog post about how frustrated I was with the non-measurements. I need specifics, Jenny!!!
I may have to give that salad a try, it looks delicious and would be easy to make vegetarian for my daughter and with chicken for my husband.
We’re going to have ‘European Dinner’ tomorrow, since it is supposed to be 92F here and I don’t want to heat up the kitchen. That will mean sausage cooked in the toaster oven, different cheeses, fruit, and baguette. Beyond that, I’m not sure.
Oh, my daughter is cooking tonight, which means she will make some spaghetti squash in the microwave, and toss it with some pasta sauce from our freezer. That will be for my husband. She will have leftover vegetarian pasta that’s in the fridge. I will likely have 1/2 and 1/2.
I fully intended to buy frozen cherries today for smoothies, and I forgot. On the other hand, we have quite a bit of fruit in the freezer that I should probably use before buying more, so maybe it’s a good thing that I forgot?
European dinner is the best idea!
And I relate fully to having a freezer full of fruit. Whoops.
I knew that the Panang curry would work on the stovetop, most likely better than in the Instant Pot.
The salad looks good! I can just imagine how good the marinade would soak into tofu or soy curls…wait I don’t need to imagine it, I can find out for myself!
You were right Birchie! It was fabulous on the stovetop and I didn’t have to worry that the InstantPot lid was going to explode and decapitate me.
I really hope you try the marinade on tofu or soy curls!!!
Everything sounds so delicious! I love that you were enjoying a cherry smoothie as you wrote this post!
Hahaha – I just can’t get enough of those cherry smoothies.
I just made a frozen-cherry smoothie and it was indeed delicious! I added a squeeze of lemon, and a packet of stevia, because mine wasn’t very flavorful without those. But I loved it! Thank you for the idea.
Next up, I’m Googling “crispy quinoa!”
Ooooh — what type of cherries did you use? I mistakenly bought tart cherries at Target a few weeks ago (it was during a mysterious cherry shortage and they were the only ones I could find) and the smoothies were definitely NOT sweet. But I have since been able to get sweet dark cherries from Costco and they are much sweeter. I think the volume of cherries you use affects the sweetness, too. But I always add a teaspoon of honey to my smoothies. AND a splash of vanilla. (Not that your solution wasn’t excellent!)
I am all about salads so thank you for the step-by-step instructions. I think I’ll want to make this.
Also, thank you for the tipps with the cherries ((I figured you used frozen – but they’re sweet cherries, right? It’s so hard to find tart cherries here. Sigh.)
Ok now I agree that salad looks delicious. But how do you make crispy quinoa? Most items in this salad are not staples in my kitchen and I would have to eat it alone. But it does look really good.