Simple Green Salad with Shallot Vinaigrette

Just a Really Great Green Salad, Dressed with the Best Honey-Dijon Vinaigrette

We tossed this green salad together to serve with our beloved chicken paillard recipe, but really it’s a go-with-anything kind of recipe. A very French shallot vinaigrette tops a mountain of tender lettuce—any lettuce you love is fine—and honey-roasted pistachios and green olives add texture and yet another layer of lovely sweet-salty flavor. Some salads are boring, it’s true, but they don’t have to be. They can be like this salad instead! Textural, exciting, sweet-salty-savory, crunchy, refreshing, downright loveable. This is the kind of salad you can throw together when you’ve got people coming in ten minutes, or to accompany an otherwise boring weeknight supper.

One Of Our Favorite Salad Dressing Recipes

Sharp shallots and creamy Dijon make perfect partners for a drizzle of honey in this lovely shallot vinaigrette recipe. Mince the shallots as finely as you can, and they’ll really make this salad recipe sing. It’s little things like fresh shallots and lemon zest in this homemade dressing that take this salad from regular to restaurant-quality. Here’s everything you’ll need to make this exceptional dressing:

• Extra virgin olive oil

• Dijon mustard

• Honey

• Lemons

• Shallots

What Greens Are Best for Salad?

For salad-loving nerds like us, this is a really, really fun question to answer. Salad greens are SO delicious and they come in just about any size, shape, color or even flavor (no, really) that you can imagine. There is a salad green out there for everyone, it’s just a matter of finding the one you love best. Or, if you’re pairing this simple salad with a particular meal, you might select a lettuce based on what goes best with what your main dish is. If you pair this salad with chicken paillard—which again, is what we created it for—a classic choice is spicy, spritely, tender arugula. Seasonality is also always a consideration with salad greens! Look for what’s in season—in the midwinter, purple bitter lettuces like radicchio are peaking, where as in the early summer, you’ll find red leaf lettuce at its tenderest best. The best greens for salad are always going to be whatever is fresh and in season. Topped with crunchy pistachios, salty green olives and a beautifully balanced honey-shallot-Dijon dressing, there’s no way to make a bad salad with this salad recipe. With all of that in mind, here are some of our favorite greens to make this salad recipe with:

• Butter lettuce. We love it! It’s sweet, tender, crunchy and it seems to go with everything. Plus those little cups looks so pretty, almost like flower petals.

• Arugula. Perhaps a little spicy for kids, but most grown-ups (and some adventurous kids!) love these assertive, flavorful leaves. Peppery and delicious on their own, when paired with this dressing recipe they become a salad that’s absolutely unforgettable.

• Mesclun mix or “spring mix”. This is usually just what it sounds like—a mix of lettuces. You can find it at the farmers market from early spring well into fall, or in those plastic clamshell boxes of lettuce at the grocery store. At the farmers market, a lettuce mix like this will often include a varied blend of whatever lettuce is in season—in the winter that might be hearty greens like kale, or in the warmer months it might be a spicy, textural combination of dandelion greens, frisée, baby spinach, mâche or endive.

• Good old red leaf lettuce. Darker in color than butter lettuce, red leaf lettuce heads are perhaps not quite as perky and pretty but the flavor is always lovely. Plus red leaf lettuce heads are always covered in leaves that are tender and sweet, and (often) quite abundant, so a single head of lettuce will serve quite a lot of people.

More Simple, Healthy Salad Dressing Recipes to Try

We love salad so much that we’ve actually rounded up our 30 favorite salad recipes here. But for brevity’s sake, we’ll focus on dressings for a moment. Homemade salad dressing is the only way to go—it truly takes about 30 seconds and the difference in flavor and quality vs. store-bought dressing is huge! Here are four salad dressing recipes we adore:

• Creamy Maple Dressing

• Blue Cheese Dressing

• Honey-Mustard Dressing

• Homemade Ranch Dressing

Tools You’ll Need:

• Sharp knife

• Mixing bowl

• Whisk

• Salad tongs

You Love It, Right?

Tell us how much you love this salad recipe! We want to know what you served it with, too! Did you serve it with our chicken paillard recipe, like we do? Or maybe some other favorite? Share a photo and tag us on Instagram using @themodernproper and #themodernproper so that we can see your stuff! Happy eating!