I can never really make up my mind about spring.
It’s sloshy and muddy and wet. The snow looks dirty. It’s never quite warm enough. It’s a sunny 50 degrees one day, and we’re preparing for a snow emergency the next day. But on the other hand… it’s not negative five hundred degrees anymore! That is a win. It’s warm enough to make you want to take off your mittens and a hat by the end of your walk. The days are getting longer and everything outside smells like sweet rain and the earth.
So, as is usually the case around this time of year, I’m on the fence about this strange transition season into summer. However. The one thing I’m not really on the fence about is SPRING FOOD.
And my spring recipe checklist is any and all of the following:
- Crunchy
- Tangy
- Colorful
- Crunchy x2
- Bright
- Cold, or Cold/Warm Combo
- Textural (i.e. that chopped salad pizza – it’s at the end of the list)
- And Crunchy x3
I feel like this is the season where my mouth full wakes up after a few delicious but mushy months wading through soups and stews and all the comforting food of winter.
So I am full-on embracing the crunch! I am diving headfirst into all the color and the texture and the flavor that makes your mouth pucker just a tiny bit. If you’re feeling me, these clean eating recipes are my recommendations for a happy spring!
1: Spring Detox Cauliflower Salad
Hi! It me. In salad form. This salad is the happiest spring recipe I can think of. It’s inspired by a recipe from The First Mess, so naturally it’s loaded with all kinds of vegetable texture, crunch, and color such as: riced cauliflower, sliced apples, roasty chickpeas, avocado, fistfuls of herbs, and a mustardy dressing. It is SO GOOD. And so necessary for spring.
Click here for the Spring Detox Cauliflower Salad recipe.
2: Spring Roll Bowls with Sweet Garlic Lime Sauce
I have had a mad craving for spring rolls these last few weeks, and when I just can’t bring myself to chop and soak and roll, I just toss everything in a bowl with some rice noodles instead. I like to eat this nice and cold and lime-y and crunchy. HAPPY FEELS.
Click here for the Spring Roll Bowls Recipe.
3: Avocado Egg Salad
First of all, THE EVERYTHING BAGEL. Secondly, this avocado egg salad is life. Just mash some avocados, toss in some hard boiled eggs (hello, Easter) and add some herbs, lemon juice, and salt. YUM to the max. See also: I love everything bagels.
Click here for the Avocado Egg Salad recipe.
4: Berry Chia Overnight Oats
This is an oats meets smoothie meets chia pudding mash-up in the best possible way. Also, it’s pink and it’s pretty. Also, you can put it in a stemless wine glass and feel fancy about it. These are my essentials for a happy spring.
Click here for the Berry Chia Overnight Oats recipe.
5: Yummy Salmon Burgers with Slaw, Duh
This might sound 90% crazy but I love this as much for the quick and crunchy slaw as I do for those crispy, salty salmon burgers. This recipe comes together in literally 15 minutes and it is everything I want in a spring meal. Filling, nutritious, and DANG GINA yummy.
Click here for the Salmon Burgers with Slaw recipe.
6: Korean BBQ Yum Yum Rice Bowls
I make variations on this recipe constantly – burritos, tacos, etc. – but the essentials are this: reeeeally flavorful, tender, pull-apart meat, steamy white or brown rice, and something very crunchy – slaw, kimchi, whatever ya got. I, of course, like to be a little dramatic with my food so I always top it off with a thick drizzle of yum yum sauce or spicy mayo and a hit of peanuts, herbs, lime, and maybe sesame seeds. Overkill? More like overawesome. Pro Tip: Make your meat in the slow cooker. It’s SO yummy.
Click here for the Korean BBQ Rice Bowl recipe.
7: Detox Rainbow Roll Ups With Peanut Sauce
These beauties can be wrapped with anything, but I like to use a big ol collard leaf because spring! health goals! crunchy and fresh! Everything gets layered with curry hummus and fresh veggies (spring roll style!) and then you dip them into peanut sauce. Thank you and goodnight.
Click here for the Detox Rainbow Roll Ups recipe.
8: Perfect Baked Salmon And Lentils
Gosh, I love this recipe. You literally put everything in the oven together and then make a quick lemon sauce (SPRING) and then poof! You have this gorgeous, healthy dinner. The pink in the picture is a pile of sweet, tangy purple sauerkraut that I would highly recommend you make or buy. It rounds the whole thing out into color, texture, and flavor bliss.
Click here for the Perfect Baked Salmon and Lentils recipe.
9: Goddess Curry Chicken Salad
We meet again, Everything Bagel. I can’t not. You know this about me. I am normally not a big fan of chicken salad which is why THIS chicken salad is a pretty big deal, okay? This chicken salad is legit. It is made with Greek yogurt, but not in a way that tastes overly healthy, because we add some olive oil in there to keep the good fats going. There are golden raisins, cilantro, pistachios (surprise!), and plenty of juicy curry-spiced chicken. It is my favorite of all chicken salads.
Click here for the Goddess Curry Chicken Salad recipe.
10: Chopped Salad Pizza
I have not been able to get this out of my mind lately. Basically this involves an EXCELLENTLY tangy, crunchy, textural chopped salad with the works (we’re talking pepperoncinis and salami and kalamatas and feta and chickpeas and homemade Italian dressing) that is assembled on top of a lightly-sauced-and-cheesed crunchy flatbread pizza crust. In full disclosure, I didn’t make my own flatbread, but if you wanted to be 100% on the clean eating thing, you could do that and we’d all super admire you. OH MY SALAD this is so good.
Click here for the Chopped Salad Pizza recipe.
Okay, tell me.
Have you made any of these recipes? What are your other spring recipe faves?
FEED MEEEEE.
Love your recommendations for a happy spring! I am so ready to embrace the CRUNCH! Definitely going to try your detox rainbow roll ups and the chopped salad pizza!
I made the chopped salad pizza like three times this weekend! so good!
Those salmon burgers look so so good! Happy spring!
WE JUST MADE THAT SALAD PIZZA SITUATION LAST NIGHT! The dressing is amazing, and I loved that it was easily tossed together with pantry staples. Perfect amount of tang and crunch. Didn’t have time to run to the store, so we did make our own thin crust pizza–it was perfection. Love your healthy-ish recipes (aka this one, and Kale Salad + Sweet Potatoes).
Ahh you and I both! Makes me so happy to hear!
i am so ready for spring!! what a great recipe round up.
These look amazing! I can’t wait to make every single one of them this month!
The Rainbow Rollups look so fresh and springy
Happy Monday Lindsay,
I just wanted to check in real quick with the beautiful PinchofYum community real quick while working online and creating content. I see you wrote quite an interesting post about eating right. I just wrote and published one myself about healthy eating and the vegan life. I’ll be sure to double back sometime today and post a valuable and lengthy blog comment about your blog here on eating clean for good health. I’m really glad side hustle food bloggers like yourself are online doing this which keeps me inspired to keep moving forward with my entrepreneurial endeavors. Thank you for just being you Lindsay. 🙂
This is awesome, Lindsay! As a health blogger and group fitness instructor, I’m all about clean eating. I always tell my clients to “eat the rainbow” (which basically means to eat as many different colored fruits and veggies as possible) so they can get a variety of nutrients and vitamins into their diet. This post is the perfect example of that! I can tell just by looking at the variety of colors in the photos that these recipes are both healthy and delicious!
I’ll definitely be adding many of these recipes to my list for this month (especially, the salmon with lentils– YUM!) and I’ll be sharing this post with some of my clients as well. Thank you so much! 🙂
So great to hear Alyssa! Thanks for the comment!
ooooo,those salmon burgers!! will definitely try them out!
I’ve made the spring detox cauliflower salad and the baked salmon and lentils. So delicious.
Next up is the salmon burgers, looks so juicy 🙂
http://simplehealthstyle.com
thank you for all of these, the first recipe is wonderfully full of lovely ingredients and can say similar things about the chopped salad pizza!
What a great collection of yummy recipes! I love overnight oatmeal, and many of the other ingredients and combinations are favorites too. Think you just made my weeks food list and recipes. Thank you!
I’m so into these recipes! I’m in the middle of a little digestive “spring cleaning” – cutting out all sorts of foods for a few weeks (not because I believe they make me “toxic” or anything, but because it makes me focus more on vegetables, legumes and whole grains when I don’t give myself other options). I’m feeling pretty awesome!
I have made the Chopped Salad Pizza too many times to count at this point, most recently just this past weekend. It’s SO. GOOD. I put sundried tomato pesto on the base before it goes in the oven, and it is just sublime with all the toppings. That simple Italian dressing is amazing. Definitely going to be trying the salmon patties soon. Come onnnnn Spring!
Lovely recipes, i feel a great satisfaction when i try your recipes and succeed:) Thank you so much for sharing this.
Good morning Lindsay,
I was quite productive yesterday and had to wait until later to post this comment. So as I was thinking, the new year gave me a renewed sense of the goals I should work toward accomplishing. I’ve been working on them. But I am human and slipped recently again and started munching. Good news is, I’m slowly doing my cardio and going to try my hand again at not only clean eating, but intermittent fasting. I miss the days when I was a slim person with a flat stomach. Getting that back as you age can be an uphill battle at times. But with a positive mindset of moving forward and striving to live and eat healthy, all is possible. 🙂
Thanks for posting this inspiring blog about healthy eating!
SO. I’m obsessed with the Everything But The Bagel sprinkle from Trader Joes, and that would be ahhhhhhhhhhmazing on/in the avocado egg salad or the curry chicken salad— which I would totally scoop up with some cucumber slices because SPRING IS BASICALLY HERE. Even though we still have that white stuff all over the place.
The rainbow roll ups are a crowd-pleaser! I prepared them for the extended family a few days ago. Even the youngins loved them.
Hey Lindsay,
Just had to double back and give you props for always having attractive and eye popping quality food photos. I was wondering what kind of digital camera you’re using to take these photos. I need to step my game up on dnn and take quality photos like yours. Can you recommend the camera or a like camera that takes these kinds of amazing photos? Feel free to email me the recommended links if you’d like anytime. Thank you.
Keep up the good work on your food blogging side hustle! 🙂
Hey Dnn,
Lindsay has a whole page about what equipment she uses that you will LOVE! https://pinchofyum.com/resources/resources-for-food-bloggers
She and her Husband, Bjork, actually have a few businesses now and one of them may be of interest to you, Food Blogger Pro, (https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/) which includes many instructional videos on photography…among tons of others! Highly recommend! They just closed the registration, unfortunately, but you can hop on the waiting list for the next registration that will be just around the corner 🙂
The photos of that perfect baked salmon and lentils is still in my top 5 favorite photos….those colors <3 I just cant get over how gorgeous 🙂
all of these recipes look delicious!
So many good recipes here! Pinning for next week ♥!
Food is always a need of any person, it seems very tasty and delicious
I live that salmon and lentils dish – I make it all the time! It’s so quick and very tasty
Glad to hear that, Emily!
All of these recipes sound good and perfect for spring.
I can’t wait to try the salmon burgers! They look awesome! Thanks for sharing!
Hope you enjoy them!