I love making big salads in the summertime with the abundance of fresh, organic vegetables we have growing in our garden. Each day it's a different salad. Sometimes I get on a kick and will use the same vegetables and dressing for days in a row. Lately I've been making this amazing Creamy Lemon-Dill Dressing. It's so good, I usually double the recipe below so I can have leftovers for the next day!

I've been posting photographs and the occasional recipe (or at least the ingredients) to my Instagram account. So be sure to go there to get the scoop on how I live this organic, gluten-free, whole foods lifestyle daily with five children.

If you are not familiar with nasturtium or kohlrabi….let me explain. First off, it's great for our bodies and our taste buds to experience new flavors and new plant chemicals. Remember, your genetics have less to do with your health than the environment that they are exposed to. Research has discovered over tens of thousands of miraculous plant chemicals in the last few decades, and it appears that each plant has it's own powerful array of these compounds.

The nasturtium plant is an annual that produces beautiful bright orange edible flowers and tender green leaves, both of which have a delicate peppery flavor. They are great companion plants for your garden, attracting beneficial predatory insects.  Kohlrabi is a cruciferous vegetable, sometimes known as a German turnip, that is delicious either raw or cooked. I prefer eating it raw in salads, or as an alternative to chips for homemade dips. We use the tender, mild tasting greens as wraps in place of tortillas.
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We've been picking strawberries lately. A lot of strawberries. Organic of course. Perfectly sweet, juicy, and ripe. So naturally, we've been eating a lot of strawberries, the way fresh strawberries ought to be eaten….not shipped halfway across the country in little plastic cartons grown in massive mono-cropped fields. These berries were grown in nutrient-rich soil from a small organic farm not too far from our house. Our children count the days till strawberry picking time each year. It's one of their favorite activities. Undoubtedly, they are picking more per minute now than I do. Yes! We have a dream team of 5 little berry pickers (okay maybe just 4 as our toddler really likes to just graze instead of fill her bucket). I tell them if they want to eat frozen fruit and make smoothies, then they need to help in the harvesting. It's fun! They love it.
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We just got back from visiting family in the midwest. This recipe is one my mom likes to make often, though I have put my own twist to it. She asked me to make it one evening for dinner, but we were out of sliced almonds, which she toasts on the stove with a little bit of honey and sprinkles over the salad. I found raw pumpkin seeds in her freezer and devised my own version of candied seeds. We made this salad again and again during our trip and everyone enjoyed it!

Since we've been back home, our children have been picking all of the juicy, ripe strawberries growing in a special 3-tiered strawberry bed we built a few years ago for our backyard. I am not sure there will ever be enough for a salad! If you don't have strawberries available, try fresh blueberries, blackberries, or raspberries instead.
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We receive quite a few comments and requests about nut-free recipes. Indeed, we do eat a lot of nuts, but we enjoy seeds quite often as well. This creamy ranch-style dressing is perfect to top any type of green salad, be it a crispy romaine salad or a picnic potato salad. If you use less water the dressing is a creamy dip for carrot and celery sticks. I also love that this dressing is raw, made from soaked raw sunflower seeds. Before you go to bed at night just place the seeds in a bowl and cover with filtered water. If I am making this dressing for dinner then I would begin soaking the seeds around lunchtime.

I use lemon juice and garlic in this dressing, which for some breastfeeding moms might be problematic (if your baby is very young). Our baby just turned 3 months and can tolerate just about anything I eat now. Early on I could not eat lemon juice or raw garlic. So if you are making this recipe for a new mom or are breastfeeding yourself (or cannot tolerate citrus), I would replace the lemon with about 3 tablespoons of raw apple cider vinegar or coconut vinegar and omit the garlic.
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