Easy Summer Side Dishes: Italian Chickpea Salad & Cornbread Salad

Italian chickpea salad ingredients:

• 1 can chickpeas (garbanzo beans) drained
• 1 cucumber diced
• 1 bell pepper diced
• 1/2 red onion diced
• Olive Garden Italian dressing or oil and vinegar
• Salt and pepper to taste

If you're growing your own cucumbers, this would be a great way to use those. I could use green pepper, which is cheaper, but I wanted some color, so I chose one of these orange bell peppers.

I'm only going to be using half of an onion. I'm going to do red, because, again, I want to add some color.

If you don't want to buy the Italian dressing, the Olive Garden Italian dressing, use oil and vinegar.

Directions for Italian chickpea salad:

I have washed my cucumber and bell pepper. I'm going to start by peeling the cucumber and dicing it into small, bite-sized pieces. I'm also dicing up the pepper and half the red onion. 

I have all my veggies prepped. I'm not going to be adding any meat to this salad, but if you wanted to, you could add cooked chicken or some tuna.

After I get these veggies into a bowl, I am going to add a can of chickpeas or garbanzo beans, draining and rinsing them first.

Next, we're ready to add in the Olive Garden dressing or oil and vinegar. I'm just going to give that a toss and I'm just going to kind of eyeball it. 

I want all those veggies and beans to be coated with the dressing, but I don't want it to be swimming in it.

Next, I'm going to be adding in simple seasonings. I'm only going to be adding salt and pepper. You could add whatever seasonings you like, but I'm keeping this salad very simple. 

I'm going to add this to my fridge and just let it hang out for a while until we are ready to eat dinner. 

This is so light and fresh and just a wonderful lunch on a summer day or it would be a great side to take with you on a picnic. You get some protein from the chickpeas, but you could add some protein to this salad as well.

I am going to be using this as a meal prep this week, so I went ahead and put the salad into individual containers to have for lunches throughout the week. 

2. Cornbread salad

Cornbread salad ingredients:

• 1 cake of cornbread crumbled
• 2 cans of pinto beans drained
• 1 can corn drained
• 1 green pepper diced
• 1 tomato diced
• 2 cups of Ranch dressing (I made it up from a Ranch seasoning packet)
• Cheese 
• Green onions and bacon on top

Cornbread salad preparation:

First, I'm making my package of cornbread according to the directions. You'll need a mixing bowl for your ingredients: Jiffy cornbread and muffin mix, milk, and one egg. 

To start, I am cracking one egg into my milk mixture then, and then I'm going to add in my muffin mix. I'm going to give that a stir. 

I have preheated my oven to 450 degrees and am preheating my cast iron skillet in the oven. 

After my skillet is preheated, I'm going to pour my cornbread mixture into the hot skillet. 

I will bake the cornbread in the skillet at 450 degrees for 20 minutes.  

Once I made the cornbread cake from the Jiffy box instructions, I let it cool completely, and now I will start prepping my veggies. I have a green pepper and two tomatoes; the recipe calls for one red onion. I have about half of a red onion that's already been cut up, so I will just use that up. 

You may have seen me use this dicer a couple of times. I love this thing. It comes with several different attachments. There are different dicing sizes, shredders, slicers, and all kinds of attachments. It was so affordable, and it was so handy. 

It makes vegetable dicing so simple, especially for recipes where you want all your vegetables to be chopped the same size or maybe a smaller size than you would with a knife. Using my veggie dicing tool, I will use the larger dice attachment for this recipe. 

All I've done after washing my veggies was cut them into chunks. The vegetables all come out in a very uniform size. I even did my tomatoes as well because, for this recipe, I wanted all my vegetables to be very small.

Next, we will make the ranch dressing that goes on top of this cornbread salad. 

The dressing recipe calls for one cup of sour cream, one cup of mayonnaise, and then one packet of ranch dressing mix. 

So I'm just going to put these ingredients into my little measuring cup, and then we're going to stir this. Now I am ready to assemble this salad. 

Cornbread salad assembly:

I'm going to put it in this Tupperware bowl.

I will take my cornbread cake and crumble it up all in the bottom of this bowl.

Next, I will drain and rinse two cans of pinto beans, and I will put that as the next layer on top of my cornbread. Now you want to spread this and ensure it's evenly layered. 

The next layer is green peppers. So I will add my diced green peppers on top of the pinto beans.  

The next layer is the corn.

I'm going to drain this can of corn, and then I'm going to add that on top of the green peppers. Spread this around so that it is evenly layered. For the next layer, I'm going to add the purple onion. These are pretty strong purple onions, so feel free to omit this if you're not a strong onion person. 

Then we're going to add on our tomatoes.

Now you're going to add your ranch mixture on top of those tomatoes. I just spread it around, make sure that it covers, and then we're just going to top it with some shredded cheddar cheese.

I had a few green onions, so I just decided to get those out and scatter a few of those on top. Bacon would be delicious as well.

This is my finished layered salad served in a bowl.

When it comes time to serve, look at all these beautiful colors, layers, and flavors. This is a great meatless meal option. This summer side dish recipe makes a ton of food. Delicious and healthy because it has lots of fresh produce in it. You get your protein from the beans. It doesn't get really soggy if you want to keep it in the fridge for a few days.

Easy summer side dishes

I hope you're enjoying the summer side dish ideas I've been sharing. Let me know if you try this recipe if you like it, and if you have your own variations. If you have another favorite summer side, please also share your recipe in the comments.