How to make sensationally good-looking salads

This is an easy win. By carefully picking a selection of different leaves, of different sizes and dressing them with edible flowers and herbs you’ll have all your lunch guests demanding more. These are our top tips:

  1. Use a mixture of different leaves with different flavours, sizes, shapes and colours:
    Use a few different lettuce leaves, both big and small, along with other salad leaves. Wild Rocket is always a winner, but try adding some baby chard leaves, red veined sorrel and frills mustard too.
  2. Add fresh herbs:
    Coriander, basil, chervil and parsley leaves all work really well in a salad and can help to round the different flavours.
  3. Use edible flowers to add colour:
    Try a sprinkling of calendula petals, some violas or some pretty blue borage flowers. You could also use courgette or squash flowers for a splash of yellow.
  4. Add seeds or toasted nuts for texture:
    Pumpkin seeds, pine nuts, sesame seeds, chopped hazelnuts and so on – they will all add a bit of texture (and flavour) and help to make the salad go a little further.
  5. Let people dress their own:
    Let others add their own oil and vinegar to taste. You might find that people are less inclined to add dressing when it tastes this good anyway!