This Loaded Summer Vegetable Salad with Black Beans is a perfect way to use all that fresh summer produce that needs to be eaten! It’s great as a side dish or with chips!
Although I’d much rather have fall weather over summer, I still love summer produce and that’s what this Loaded Summer Vegetable Salad with Black Beans is all about! My inspiration for this summer vegetable salad was to pretend that I have a garden and I was trying to use up the rest of my veggies before the end of the season 🙂
In full disclosure I bought all my ingredients from the grocery store haha, but one of these days I’d love to have a garden to pick from!
I knew I was going to do a Mexican themed salad with black beans but also wanted to pack as many summer vegetables into it as I could. I had planned that everything would be completely raw but then I saw the zucchini and summer squash and I knew I had to add them in too!
You’re more than welcome to keep them raw but I prefer them sautéed. I like to let them cool a little before I add them though so it’s still a cool, fresh summer salad.
This salad is great as a BBQ side dish and also delicious as a dip with tortilla chips. I just like to stand in the refrigerator and eat it out of the bowl with a spoon 🙂
I know that summer isn’t quite over yet, but I’m really ready for some cooler weather! A week from today we are packing up and driving to Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s a little crazy to think about and I feel like we still have so much to do, but I’m really looking forward to having a proper fall and winter this year!
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Loaded Summer Vegetable Salad with Black Beans
- Total Time: 30 minutes
- Yield: 4-6 1x
Description
This Loaded Summer Vegetable and Black Bean Salad is a perfect way to use all that fresh summer produce that needs to be eaten! It’s great as a side dish or with chips!
Ingredients
- 3 teaspoons olive oil, divided
- 1 small zucchini, diced
- 1 small summer squash, diced
- 1 (15 ounce) can back beans, or 1 1/2 cups
- 1 cup cooked corn kernels
- 1 pint cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
- 1 small orange bell pepper, diced
- 1 medium avocado, pitted and diced
- 1/3 cup diced red onion
- 1 large handful fresh cilantro
- 1 clove garlic, minced
- Juice of 1 lime
- 1 teaspoon cumin
- 1 teaspoon chili powder
- Salt
- Black Pepper
Instructions
- Heat a large skillet over medium heat and add 1 teaspoon olive oil and diced zucchini and summer squash. Season with salt and pepper and cook until tender and browning, 10 minutes. Let cool for about 5-7 minutes.
- In a large bowl add the cooled zucchini and squash, black beans, corn and all the remaining veggies.
- Top with 2 teaspoons olive oil, lime juice, cumin, chili powder and salt and pepper to taste. Mix until everything is combined. Enjoy with as a dip for chips or as a side dish!
Notes
If you’re making this salad ahead of time wait until serving to add the avocado. Salad will stay good in the refrigerator for 2-3 days.
- Prep Time: 20 mins
- Cook Time: 10 mins
- Category: Salad, Side
- Cuisine: Mexican
We enjoyed your summer vegetable salad very much, thank you! I served it along with another Yummly recipe, Juicy Oven Baked Chicken Breasts by Diethood, which was a perfect combo, even cutting up some of the chicken and mixing into my serving. It was good all alone, with chips, mixed with shredded Romaine, or with the chicken and it’s juice. My choices of vegetables on hand were zucchini, red bell pepper, parsley, fresh corn, avocado and red onion. I did cook the zucchini, but also the fresh corn, and just for a minute, the garlic. I decided to let the black beans soak in the lime juice dressing while I got the rest of the ingredients prepared. We’ll have this again for sure!
Awesome! So glad you enjoyed it!
Dipping chips into this summer veggie salad sounds like a perfect dinner to me!
And YAY for you getting to experience seasons more in New Mexico this fall and winter! I will be doing the same in the northeast, though I honestly don’t like winter so I’m going to have to find the positives in that haha but I adore all things autumn so I am looking forward to that!
You will definitely get to experience winter haha! The fall in the NE is so amazing though! I hope you guys are having a fun road trip!
Could you please show a picture of what you mean by a ‘summer squash’ ?
I live in Sydney Australia.
We are also metric so would be great if you could show recipes with both Imperial and Metric measurements.
Thanks
Hi Alannah, they look just like zucchini but are yellow, some people might call them yellow squash. I hope that helps! I’ll definitely keep adding metric measurements into consideration for the future 🙂