Labor Day Salads For End Of Summer

It’s a fact, the end of summer is here. The light is changing already and soon fall and comfort foods will be on the horizon.

Labor Day is just a few days away and there’s still a surplus of summer veggies still available. These salads are easy to put together and great to bring to any cookout, BBQ or just as a side dish for your own personal grilling.

Most salads here have no recipes linked because visually you can see all the ingredients I used, and as far as dressings go you can make your own favorites, but I’ll mention the ones I used.

On the bean salad above I used a balsamic vinaigrette tossed with a mix of colorful veggies and haricot verts.

For this Greek salad I used a good quality olive oil with Greek oregano, salt and pepper.

Beautiful heirloom tomatoes that I’m dearly going to miss! Adorned with burrata cheese, homemade basil pesto and olive oil.

Figs are coming in strong for their last hurrah, here’s the link how I put it together.

More tomatoes of course, on a bed of arugula with my favorite castelvetrano olives, red onion and a generous olive oil drizzle.

Mix up a “salsa” of small diced corn, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, red onion, fresh mozzarella and chickpeas, over a layer of cooked green beans or haricot verts with a healthy dose of olive oil.

With this panzanella salad you could easily replace the asparagus with green or yellow beans, here’s the link how I put it together.

I can’t put a number on how many tomato and cucumber salads we had all summer, it’s a staple in my house, it’s quick to make and the perfect side for summer eating. Good quality olive oil, fresh basil from the garden, it  doesn’t get better than that! You can toss in some toasted. bread cubes or not!

Grilled potatoes and grilled corn get tossed together with a combination of Mediterranean ingredients as shown below, the dressing I used was a white balsamic vinaigrette.

I hope these salads inspire you to use up the best and the last of summers bounty, I know I’ll be dreaming about those exquisite summer tomatoes in the dead of winter!