Quick Salad Recipes That Make Excellent Dinners on Busy Weeknights

This 30-minute dinner salad is a sublime mix of textures and flavors. The shrimp are coated in a tasty mix of pepper jelly, fresh ginger and oil and cook quickly. Then they're paired with crispy tortilla strips, mild soft edamame, crunchy romaine and coleslaw mix plus fragrant fresh herbs. It's sure to be a recipe you add to your regular dinner rotation.

This dinner salad is like summer on a plate. We turned the classic Italian salad panzanella, with bread and ripe in-season tomatoes, into a hearty main meal by adding creamy mozzarella and quick-cooking chicken cutlets to the mix.

Here's a hearty vegetarian main-dish salad bursting with black beans, jalapeños, radishes, and romaine. To make it even more delicious, we added roasted sweet potato chunks to the mix, and the result is so good we think they should be in every taco salad.

The fanciest salad in our collection, this riff on the classic that's served at steakhouses everywhere uses hangar steak to make the dish more affordable. It also subs a sweet tomato vinaigrette for the usual blue cheese dressing, making our version a little bit healthier.

No leafy greens here, but this tasty take on mezze has all of our Mediterranean favorites. Using store-bought grape leaves and canned chickpeas means it's a dish that's quick to put together.

It's easy to love a salad packed with such familiar ingredients as turkey breast, avocado, and Monterey Jack cheese, but it's even easier still when the mix is topped with no-fuss buttermilk dressing.

A combination of half charred and half raw cabbage leaves gives this salad great texture. Thinly sliced pork, cucumbers, mint, peanuts, and a dressing made of red onion, fresh lime juice, fish sauce, and serrano chile take this Thai-inspired dish to the next level.

We like to top this salad with a fried egg, but you could swap in a poached egg or a soft-boiled egg, or even an omelet, if you prefer.

When chicken cutlets are served next to crunchy blanched green beans over mixed greens, you've got a dinner salad that holds its own against any meat-and-veg meal.

This hearty salad is absolutely mouthwatering. With crunchy romaine, soft feta, and an array of fresh vegetables, it's a dinner that's guaranteed to be a hit with your entire family.

We've given the classic Caesar a down-home spin with homemade multigrain croutons and a buttermilk dressing used twice: once to marinate chicken breasts, then again to toss with the salad.

Shrimp, hard-boiled eggs, and potatoes make this a hearty salad while the cornichons and fennel make it just a little different. It comes together in only 35 minutes and cooking is minimal since the potatoes and the shrimp can be prepared in the same pan.

There's always something yummy on your fork in a good chopped salad like this one, which combines chile-rubbed pork, romaine lettuce, juicy tomatoes, corn, cheese, and a garlicky buttermilk dressing.

Once you've used our method to poach fillets of salmon, you'll never use another. The end result is creamy and supple, perfect for pairing with bold ingredients like the capers, parsley, and red onion in this salad.

We use light mayonnaise and low-fat buttermilk in our blue cheese dressing, omitting the egg yolks to cut down on fat and calories in our version of this diner classic.

Amp up canned tuna in our version of the classic French salad. It's so elegantly dressed that you won't recognize the supermarket staple.

The classic steak salad comes alive with a few easy twists, including a fiery spice rub for the meat and a super simple dressing of vinegar and store-bought salsa.

Crumbled bacon stretches the smoky flavor further than whole slices might, while light mayonnaise and crisp vegetables add fiber in this satisfying salad.

There's a secret ingredient in this salad of leafy spinach, thick ham, and hard-boiled eggs: thinly sliced radishes, which add a peppery crunch to every bite.

Cherries aren't only for jams and pies—the juicy, ruby-red summer beauties are ripe for the picking in this refreshing salad of Boston lettuce, goat cheese, walnuts, and sliced chicken.

This salad is so much better than takeout, we promise! Thin slices of medium-rare rib-eye steak makes this refreshing salad feel downright luxurious.

We've pared down the traditional Cobb salad to what are arguably its main components—greens, egg, bacon, poultry, and blue cheese—and then taken it one step further, using turkey bacon to cover two of those requirements.

Feta and white beans provide plenty of protein in this main-course salad. If you don't have white-wine vinegar, you can substitute red-wine or balsamic vinegar.

Not every steak entrée can boast as much vitamin C as this one can, and that's thanks to the orange segments mingling with strip steak, red onions, and romaine lettuce. It's all tossed together in an orange juice-based vinaigrette for bright flavor.

Grill the corn alongside the chicken to cut down on the prep time for this vibrant arugula salad.

Pound chicken breast into a thin cutlet, then top with a light, peppery watercress salad for a healthy supper.

Here's a vegetarian take on the classic Niçoise salad. Roasted carrots substitute the signature meats in this tasty dish.