creamy vegan salad dressing

It’s time for another vegan salad with all the delicious goodies you know and love, but this time the focus is on the vegan salad dressing.

Want a unique vegan salad? Check out my vegan sushi salad bowl recipe here!

When I first got on the Salad Train, I can admit that I wasn’t very imaginative, not with my ingredients and certainly not with healthy salad dressing options. I started with simple vinagrettes and then creamy dressings made with vegan yogurt, mustard and even Sriracha. But the oil is a real killer.

I know, I know, life isn’t just about calories. But when you’re trying to lose weight, which was my original goal, much of your eating life is about calories and oil comes in at 120 calories per tablespoon which is INSANE. Add in how much you need to use to make a proper vinaigrette and you can see why I started to explore other options.

So when the weather permits and when the supermarket or farmer’s market has them, I pile up on herbs. Dill, parsley, basil, mint, and pretty much whatever else green I can find. Except cilantro, it is not my jam and never has been.

So, let’s do this, shall we?

This is a hot & cold salad, which means you don’t need to cook everything but that also makes it versatile enough to eat during the hottest day of summer or as the autumn chill sets in.

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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.