Rice and Vegetable Salad
on Jul 08, 2025
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This easy vegetarian rice salad is hearty and colorful and packed with flavor. A perfect make-ahead dish for lunches, potlucks, or picnics.
Sometimes you need a salad that feels like a meal, or a side dish that’s happy to hang out in the fridge until the moment you need it. Enter this vegetable and rice salad. It’s colorful, hearty, endlessly adaptable, and just the kind of dish that shows up beautifully at a potluck or a picnic…or that you can scoop into a container for an on-the-go lunch. Plus, a great way to use up leftover cold rice!
Tossed with a tangy dressing and packed with crunchy veggies and fluffy rice, this salad checks all the boxes: make-ahead friendly, crowd-pleasing, and super satisfying. Also…it’s a great vegetable drawer clean-out recipe! All those leftover veggies will find their purpose – this salad won’t judge.
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The dressing is lightly creamy, made with olive oil, mayonnaise, lemon, and a bit of honey and Dijon. You can try other dressings instead, such as Italian Dressing or this simple vinaigrette.
What's In This Post?
Blanching Vegetables for Rice Salad
What you are doing to the green vegetables by cooking them briefly in boiling water, and then immediately draining them and plunging them into ice water, is blanching them. Blanching is a quick-cooking method, usually used with vegetables, that softens the vegetables slightly and locks in their bright color thanks to the ice bath. This also stops them from cooking further in the residual cooking heat, which is known as carryover cooking.
Kitchen Smarts
You can blanch the veggies before cutting them if you like. Sometimes, the full pieces can be easier to move to the ice water.
Tips and Variations
- Use whatever rice you have around, or that you are fancying lately. Plain old white rice is perfect, but you can also use brown rice, Texmati, jasmine, basmati, or wild rice.
- I love Melissa’s steamed beets, which come in red and golden varieties. SO easy to use, no cooking or peeling required!
- Please feel free to use whatever vegetables you like. I used beets, asparagus, and sugar snap peas for a spring version of this rice salad, but you can switch the veggies up as the seasons change.
What to Serve With Vegetable and Rice Salad
This rice salad would be great as part of a composed or prepared little salad lunch buffet, with other salads such as Pasta Salad with Chicken, Avocado and Tomato, Tomato, Avocado, and Cucumber Salad, Arugula and Cucumber Salad with Tzatziki Vinaigrette, and Modern Three Bean Salad.
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Vegetable and Rice Salad
Ingredients
- 1 cup sugar snap peas (de-stringed and halved crosswise)
- 1 cup asparagus (trimmed, and cut into 1/2-inch pieces)
- 2 cups cooked rice
- ½ cup diced cooked golden beets (see Note)
- ½ cup minced scallions (white and green parts)
For the Dressing:
- ¼ cup mayonnaise
- 2 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 tablespoon honey
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice
- 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
- Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper (to taste)
Instructions
- Bring a medium pot of water to a boil. Salt generously with kosher salt, and return to a boil. While the water is coming to a boil, fill a medium bowl with ice water and keep it nearby.
- Add the sugar snap peas and asparagus and cook for 2 minutes, then drain and immediately plunge the drained vegetables into the cold water to stop the cooking. Let it sit in the cold water for 2 minutes, then drain again.
- While the vegetables are in the water bath, in a large bowl, combine the mayonnaise, olive oil, honey, lemon juice, mustard, salt, and pepper.
- Add the cooled blanched vegetables, rice, beets, and scallions and toss to combine. Serve at room temperature
