Sustainable food recipes – quick broccoli and spinach salad with couscous

By Kelsey Patterson and Anders Lorenzen

This is our first in a series of climate-friendly recipes – collaborating recipe content with chefs, Influencers and bloggers. Below we are featuring US-based food blogger Kelsey Patterson’s broccoli and spinach salad. You can learn more about Kelsey and find more recipes on Sigsbee Street and her Instagram.

Below are Kelsey’s words about the recipe and not least the recipe and at the bottom I will include all the carbon and climate perspectives as well as a carbon footprint calculation.

Quick broccoli and spinach salad with couscous

Nothing says fresh quite like a vibrant green salad. This one is packed with greens, grains, and nuts. What I love about this recipe is its versatility — depending on the season, you can add spring vegetables like snap peas or cauliflower in the fall. You can even grow your own broccoli or spinach to add to the salad. Spinach and broccoli are both easy to grow in a home garden. They are extremely nutrient-dense foods which means you can get a lot of benefits with little resource input.

The main grain in this recipe is couscous. Couscous is made from semolina durum wheat. This type of wheat is a low-impact crop and requires minimal processing. With that said, you could easily switch out the couscous with quinoa or farro if these ingredients are accessible.

Sometimes we want a salad to be more than just a lettuce base. This broccoli-spinach salad is a quick salad to put together and has the perfect mix of flavours and textures. The couscous brings a heartiness to it with the cranberries and feta adding bursts of flavor.

Do you need to cook the broccoli?

Nope! One great part about this broccoli salad recipe is that you don’t need to cook the broccoli beforehand. Just make sure to chop up the broccoli very finely. This makes it easy to eat raw. I try to avoid any large chunks and make sure to cut off the stems. Mostly use the broccoli florets to chop up since these are much easier to eat raw.

If you want a roasted broccoli in this salad you could chop it up, toss it with some olive oil and salt and roast in the oven at 400°F for 15-20 minutes. Then you can add it to the salad.

Tips for making a broccoli salad

• Cut up your broccoli pieces very small. Since you are eating the broccoli raw, make sure to chop it up finely. This actually makes adding the broccoli much easier because you don’t have to break off individual florets. Just cut off the stems and chop up the broccoli with your knife.
• Mix up the nuts. This recipe calls for sliced almonds but you could really use any type of nuts or seeds in this recipe. Pecan, pumpkin seeds, or sunflower seeds would be a great swap.

Can I make it ahead of time?

If you want to make this salad in advance just pre-chop everything and add it to a bowl. I would keep the couscous in a separate container and mix it in before serving. I would also keep the dressing in a separate container and add that before serving so your spinach doesn’t get soggy. If you have already tossed everything together you can store it in the fridge in an airtight container but it will probably only be good for about a day.

What goes well with a broccoli salad?

This is a great side dish to any main course. I love serving it alongside some homemade pizzas, a warm bowl of bean chilli, or a creamy vodka sauce pasta. It is a great healthy addition to any meal.

The recipe

Quick broccoli and spinach salad with couscous

The carbon footprint and overall climate guidance 

This is already a low-carbon recipe, but a good rule of thumb is to further bring down the carbon footprint, get your products locally where possible or even grow them yourself, or swap the higher-carbon products such as almonds, cranberries and cheese for lower carbon versions.

Carbon footprint table: