bulgur salad

What do you do when you don’t have enough fresh veggies to make a salad but you’re not prepared to make anything more complicated than a salad? You hit up the grain section in your kitchen pantry, pull out the bulgur and make magic!

I don’t know how you guys go shopping but I am a list-a-holic. I create a menu for what I plan to make and all the ingredients I need, with a check mark besides ingredients we already have at home. I give my husband the list and he does the same, then I put it into my Shopping List app which I use inside the supermarket.

My point? Only that it often happens that I’ll have a quarter of a head of lettuce, one tomato and just a nub of cucumber the day before shopping day and let’s face it, there’s not a lot that can be done with that. Unless you’re feeling creative.

Enter, bulgur salad.

If I was feeling less than generous I might call this the kitchen sink salad or garbage salad, but let’s stick with bulgur salad because you still have to put this in your mouth.

As you can see, there’s a little bit of the following:

Romaine lettuce

Bell pepper

Tomatoes

Chickpeas

Scallions

Vegan yogurt

Dill

Corn

Mustard

The yogurt, mustard and dill made a nice creamy dressing that tied everything together nicely. It was healthy, satisfying and tasty, which makes it pretty much an ideal lunch in my opinion.

Add some fried tofu or a beer on the side if you think it’s too late, but I think you’ll love it as it is. My favorite thing about a simple dish like this is you can change it up based on what you have. Since there were chickpeas and bell peppers, I added curry and cumin and piri piri to the mix, but you can make it Mexican, Italian, Greek or even American with a vegan ranch sauce.