Asparagus, egg and potato salad with tarragon vinaigrette

Asparagus generally a pretty awesome vegetable and happens to be extremely handy for people doing the 5:2 fast diet. In fact, asparagus is good for anyone watching their calories - one medium spear of asparagus has just 3 calories but packs loads of flavour and can make traditional, boring “diet foods” into something quite interesting.

Case in point: salads. This is a favourite for many fast dieters because it allows one to have a big pile of food - quite nutritious food, at that - without necessarily having a big pile of calories along with it. But salads can be problematic: how many of us have eaten a gargantuan salad only to find ourselves deeply unsatisfied at the end of it?

Let’s face it, there are many dimensions to food satisfaction: not only quantity, but flavour and texture, too. This is where asparagus can come to a salad’s rescue with its notable flavour and crisp bite (provided you don’t boil it to death). It also pairs extremely well with other fast-diet-friendly foods like eggs and potatoes, plus fresh herbs like dill, tarragon and chives, which all together can make a salad so much more than a pile of leaves.

Dressing helps, too, but even a simple treatment of lemon juice and olive oil with salt and pepper can go along way (a little Parmesan helps, too, which is fairly low-calorie as far as cheeses go). But if you want to take it a little further, I can heartily recommend the tarragon vinaigrette recipe I’ve posted below. This dressing, when combined with asparagus, potato, egg and other salady stuff, makes for an incredibly flavoursome fast day lunch or dinner dish - it clocks in at about 250 Calories, leaving you plenty of extra calories (250 if you’re a woman, 350 if you’re a man) for another asparagus session for later in the day.

You can adapt this recipe to use whatever salad vegetables you have on hand; the dressing is marvellously versatile. Calories: ~250 per portion.