A salad bowl is such a simple meal: just stick loads of healthy things in a bowl together. However, I don’t eat this sort of thing often at uni, because it relies on having a large variety of ingredients in your fridge or cupboard. Having said that, most of these ingredients are cheap, and buying them once will give you lunches for a few days.

A salad bowl is, of course, healthy, but the one I made was filling too, full of protein. It’s so easy to customise with whatever you like or have available. Here’s what I made, and a few more ideas.

Ingredients I used

Mixed lettuce leaves

Mixed nuts

The crust end of a loaf of bread

A few cloves of garlic

Wensleydale and goat’s cheese

Ready-to-eat king prawns

Avocado

Cucumber

Fresh raw peas

Mayonnaise

Sweet chilli sauce

A few more ideas

Rice (brown would work well)

Quinoa

Couscous

Cooked chickpeas

Cold roast chicken or sausage slices

Other types of fruit or veg (halved grapes or tomatoes)

Other cheese, such as feta

Seeds (sesame, chia and poppy would work nicely scattered over the top)

Any sauce or salad dressing you like 

Method

Give the lettuce a rinse. Chop up your cheese, cucumber, avocado, nuts and garlic. Toast the nuts in a dry frying pan for few minutes. Then you can toast the breadcrumbs (just roughly tear up a slice of bread) and garlic, with a splash of olive oil.

Place all your salad items in a bowl, drizzle over mayo and sweet chilli sauce, plus a grind of black pepper, and tuck in!