Farmers Market Vegetable Salad is a chunky chopped veggie salad with a tangy tarragon/lemon vinaigrette. Hit the market, raid your garden, or clear out the fridge, this is a summer must-make.
One of the little moments I look forward to every summer is the appearance of the first yellow wax beans. You have to understand that it’s taken me decades to shrug off the memory of the squeaky wax beans from a can that my mom served ALL the time. With every squeaky bite you’d get a squirt of the canning liquid. Yuck.
Once I realized there was an actual fresh, delicious version of wax beans, I’ve been obsessed with them. I always try to have a plan in place so when I spot them every summer I can whisk them home and immediately set to making something amazing. Like this farmers market vegetable salad. Yum.
I make lots of chunky vegetable and bean salads in the warmer months, and to keep them from becoming boring I challenge myself to come up with a distinctive dressing for each one. My popular Mediterranean Bean Salad has an Italian vinaigrette. My Spring Vegetable Salad has a miso dressing. This one is a tarragon/anchovy/lemon vinaigrette that I think you’ll love. I use my immersion blender to blitz it into a creamy emulsion. Leave out the anchovy if you’re not into fish, or vegetarian.
I have a heavy hand with the dressing in this case, the veggies marinate in it and soak up the flavor. Be sure to give it a toss just before serving to redistribute the dressing.
I loaded this salad up with color, but in all honestly it was a clean out the fridge salad, so feel free to improvise. The fresh beans are the stars, and I think the corn adds a needed sweetness. The feta gives it substance, and the olives and marinated peppers give it zing. Other than that, add what you like.
In this farmers market vegetable salad all my veggies are raw except the beans ~ be sure to blanche them, it makes all the difference. Blanching tenderizes the beans and brings out their color and sweetness.
HOW TO BLANCH FRESH BEANS FOR VEGETABLE SALADS
With fresh beans like green and yellow string beans you want to briefly blanche them to tenderize and bring out the flavor. I do this in the microwave:
- Put the cut beans in a microwave safe bowl and add a little water.
- Loosely cover the bowl and microwave for about 2 minutes.
- Drain and rinse in cold water or an ice bath.
- The beans will be bright green and crisp tender.
More fresh chunky veggie salads to try
Farmers Market Vegetable Salad
Ingredients
- 1 pound trimmed green and wax beans, cut into bite sized pieces
- 1/2 cup finely diced red onion
- 1/2 cup assorted color bell peppers, diced
- 1/2 cup halved cherry tomatoes
- 1 carrot, diced
- 1 small pickling cucumber, chopped
- an ear of corn, steamed and kernels removed
- 1/3 cup marinated peppers, I used little red bird’s beak peppers
- 1/3 cup olives, halved
- 1/2 cup crumbled or chopped feta cheese
dressing
- 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
- juice of 1 lemon
- 1 tsp Dijon mustard
- 1 tsp honey
- 2 Tbsp tarragon leaves
- 1-2 anchovies, or 1 tsp anchovy paste
- salt and fresh cracked black pepper to taste
Instructions
- Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl.
- Put the dressing ingredients in a wide mouthed mason jar or small bowl and use an immersion blender to blend until it is emulsified. Taste to adjust any of the ingredients to your own preference.
- Pour the dressing over the salad and toss gently. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours before serving.
Notes
- Make it simpler ~ I think this would be lovely with just the blanched green beans and the dressing.
Nutrition
Hi…Your comment about canned beans took me back some 70 years. My Mom used to serve canned asparagus as a side with a dollop of mayo on top. I’ll leave the taste & feel up to your imagination. Today’s world of FRESH food is astounding compared to what we had ONLY seasonally then. Enjoy it all & thanks for an easy,healthy & yummy salad. Nancy
Haha, thanks for the chuckle Nancy!
Simply perfect way to enjoy the abundance this time of year! Lovely 🙂
That dressing sounds delicious! I don’t have any fresh beans, yet, but I’m going to try it with subbing in zucchini for the beans. Thanks for another recipe!
Good idea, let us know how it turns out.
Another gorgeous rainbow salad with so much creativity. I’m loving the beans and the heavy handed dressing – sounds divine and looks fantastic 🙂 Sharing and pinning and wishing I had this for dinner today!
We make a lot of veggie salads at this time of the year, too. So good! And it’s a necessity — we gotta do SOMETHING with all the produce we buy (it all looks so good, we can’t resist). Super post — thanks.
Really, forget the garden glut, I’ve got supermarket glut!
I had a HUGE portion of green beans for the lunch too. Your farmer market salad looks so colourful and yummy!