When you get out to grill in the summer months, the right sides to go with your steak, chicken, or franks can make the difference between a good meal and a great one. With so many options to compliment, sometimes nothing completes a delicious dinner of hot and savory meats quite like a well-made salad of cool, crisp veggies and greens served with the perfect dressing to cool off from the summer heat. This weeks recipe isn’t for just any old side salad, and we aren’t just grilling juicy Halal chicken, we’re grilling the salad to go with it! In the end you’ll be enjoying the fresh grilled flavors of seasoned chicken, sweet corn, and grilled greens, while still enjoying cool and refreshing veggies that come with it, it’s the best of both worlds!

Now, you may be wondering how you grill a salad while you picture loose greens falling through the grates and leaving a lovely burned mess on the inside of your grill, and the answer is simple, rather than loose salad greens this recipe uses halved romaine hearts instead. This way you’re able to slap these down on the grill for a few minutes and let them get a light sear on the outside, just enough to have a bit of grilled crispiness but keep that refreshing salad flavor and texture, only now it’s also infused with that grilled flavor we all love this time of year.

We also took the opportunity to grill some sweet corn to go on the salad later to really maximize the amount of grilling with this recipe, but other than the corn we kept the veggies relatively simple for this with halved cherry tomatoes and some sliced green onion. A great salad also needs a great dressing to bring it all together, so we made our own tahini dressing that went perfectly with the salad and the chicken. Store bought dressing is perfectly good, but if you get the chance to make a homemade dressing this is a great choice, it’s simple to make and the taste of something like this that’s fresh and homemade really can’t be beaten.

For the chicken itself we used tried and true Halal chicken breast from Midamar which is always fantastic. It’s always juicy, flavorful, and perfect with whatever seasoning is your favorite. For this recipe, we used a tandoori seasoning blend to really punch up the flavor and it paired beautifully with the flavors of the salad and the dressing. We served our romaine hearts whole with the veggies sprinkled over top and the chicken sliced into strips on top of it all, this is perfect for slicing into and dipping into the dressing, ensuring you have a bit of every flavor of the salad in every bite you take. And what a bite it is, the salad is cool and crisp with a little bit of grilled crispiness and flavor and the chicken is still hot off the grill, juicy and flavorful and the tahini dressing is cool and savory and ties everything together, this is a recipe that is satisfying to eat in every way.

That’s it for this week, and I’ll admit, when I heard about grilling a salad I had my doubts on how it would turn out, but luckily for all of us this recipe absolutely turned out and it was delicious. The best news of all is that this barely takes any longer than grilling your favorite meat and serving it with a traditional side salad. So if you’re firing up the grill anyway, I think you should really give this recipe a try because it’s absolutely worth it and may just be your new favorite way to enjoy salad this summer. That’s all the time we have this week, and as always, we hope to see you next time for a mouth-watering new Halal recipe. Enjoy!