Fluff Meringues’ Thai Summer Salad

Lighten up all that heavy holiday eating

Fresh mint is an essential component of Kristin Collins' Thai Summer Salad

This is one of my favorite summery salads. It’s incredibly flavorful and just delightful, especially in the warmer months when you don’t want something too heavy.

My Dutch friend Kimberly showed me how to make it many moons ago when I lived in London and I have savored it ever since. It has quite a few ingredients, but I tend to make a large batch of the sauce – two or three times the quantities listed below – and keep it around for future use.

Thai Summer Salad

Salad Ingredients:
• red onion, sliced in strips
• spinach (arugula or other salad will work as well, spinach is just my fav)
• tomatoes (chef’s choice)
• fresh mint chopped (lots of it – as much as you think you can take!)
• cucumber, diced

Sauce Ingredients:
1 chopped or – my preference – grated stick of lemongrass
3 tbsp fresh cilantro, chopped
1 tbsp brown sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice
3 tbsp soy sauce (you could use low sodium, too)
2 tbsp sweet chili sauce
2 tsp fish sauce

Meat
raw chicken and/or beef cut into strips – however much you want to make 2 tbsp peanut or canola oil for cooking and/or marinade (see below)

Directions:

Assemble salad with all veggies. Feel free to add other stuff as well – these are just the things that I think taste best in it. The sauce is really the star here.

Mix all sauce ingredients together well. Divide in half. One bowl will be used as dressing for the salad and one bowl will be to use for the marinade for the meat.

Place meat and one 1/2 of the sauce into a bowl or large zip lock bag and marinate in the fridge for at least an hour.

Heat up wok/skillet/pan/what-have-you and oil, then dump the meat and marinade out of the bag into the pan and fry it up! If You don’t have the time for a long marinade in the fridge, no biggie – it’ll still be good as a cooking sauce.

Add meat to the salad and enjoy!


Kristin Collins is the owner and founder of Fluff Meringues & More.

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