In summer, if you're trying to avoid heating up your kitchen, dinner salads can be a staple. Classic Niçoise salad has tomatoes, capers, green beans, hard-boiled eggs and cucumber over a bed of lettuce, and with the addition of some canned salmon or tuna, it turns into a meal. Greek salad's hallmarks include chopped ham, red onion, feta cheese, Greek olives and hard-boiled eggs, but as Jon points out, "you don't have to get carried away with adhering to some recipe." Be resourceful and creative. Tabouli is made from steamed and re-soaked bulger wheat, with lots of parsley, green onions, chopped tomatoes, olive oil, salt and pepper, and sometimes chopped mint. But you can substitute quinoa or farro (spelt) for the bulger.
Kohlrabi, the white, purple or red bulbous "thing with leaves" ("it looks like an alien," says Greg Patent) has an incredible crunch and works well sliced thinly in coleslaw along with carrots, cabbage and - if you're Jon Jackson - hot peppers.
(Broadcast: "The Food Guys," 8/14/16 and 8/18/16. Listen weekly on the radio at 11:50 a.m. Sundays and again at 4:54 p.m. Thursdays, or via podcast.)
