Adding just a few vegetables, nuts and other foods to your daily diet can improve all aspects of your health, according to a flyer from the “Eat this, not that” workshop on Sept. 27.

Nutrition professor Timaree Hagenburger and students led a workshop on preparing nutrition packed foods known as super foods to teach students how to get the most out of their diet and inspire healthy eating habits.

Crazy Salad, as Hagenburger refers to it, is a simple to make salad that is packed with various vegetables and super foods that can be prepared and eaten throughout the week.

The first ingredient is spinach and mixed greens, which generally comes mixed together at most supermarkets, sometimes marked as baby spinach. Spinach is a powerful, anti-inflammatory and is packed with antioxidants and vitamins which offer protection against common cancers, according to the workshop handouts.

Purple cabbage, carrots, broccoli, kale, zucchini, green onions and celery tossed with red onions, tomatoes and avocados make up the rest of the Crazy Salad.

Rainbow Salad, which contains broccoli, cauliflower, red cabbage and carrots, was suggested by Hagenburger as a way to get many of the vegetables together easily and for a cheap price, retailing for around 99 cents to $1.49 at Safeway.

Using knives, cutting boards and v-slicers, each of the vegetables should be chopped and minced into the smallest pieces possible. Hagenburger said to cut the veggies “small, so that each bite of salad gets each item instead of just big bites of any one vegetable.”

Make sure to wash each vegetable along with your tools and hands before preparing the salad.

Instead of using store bought dressings that tend to be full of fats and ingredients that are not natural, Hagenburger offered two alternatives.

Cowboy Salad or Cowboy Salsa is one of those alternatives. To make the dressing requires salsa, corn, cooked beans, a lime and an avocado along with a stick blender or another way to make sure to break up any chunks of tomato within the salsa.

Mix the salsa to get out the chunks before combining into a large bowl along with the other ingredients. Frozen corn was suggested as it’s already prepared and takes out the time of preparing ears of corn.

The lime should be zested with a mircroplane before it is cut to use the juice. To zest means to shave off portions of the outer skin of the lime right into the bowl with the Cowboy Salsa.

Once the zest is added the lime can be juiced into the bowl and all mixed up. Once created it can be refrigerated for up to a week, according to the recipe provided by Hagenburger.

The other alternative provided is a Tomato Vinaigrette that requires tomato paste, apple cider vinegar, lime juice, maple syrup and water amongst other ingredients in the recipe provided. In a blender or bullet, the ingredients are combined and blended till they are smooth and creamy. Then it can be stored in a glass jar and chilled before it’s served.

These recipies and more can be found at Hagenburger’s website, www.thenutritionprofessor.com.