Settlers of the Noms: Cold Salad Picnic Board

Summer is around the corner, which means means it’s time to start courting your future ant minions by coercing innocent humans into dining outdoors. My go-to picnic dishes are always cold salads. I don’t have to worry about off temperature chicken giving people food poisoning, the vegans have something to eat other than a head of wilting lettuce, but most of all, the cool flavors are incredibly refreshing after playing some frisbee or beating each other up with boffer swords.

This Settlers of Catan map is made with fresh watermelon and raspberry balsamic vinegar hills, lentil salad mountains, fields of cantaloupe mixed with pineapple and banana, forests of green beans dressed in lemon juice and herbs, and pastures of minty, lime laced honeydew, cantaloupe and green grapes.

If that sounds too healthy, I also made some blueberry sweet rolls glazed with blueberry icing for the oceans.

You can do this, too. I promise. The lentil salad can be made two days in advance (in fact, it tastes even better if you let it sit for a day so the flavors can really mingle.) The watermelon and green fruit salads can be made the night before. In fact, the only thing you really want to make the morning of your picnic is the cantaloupe, banana and pineapple salad. (The citrus will turn your bananas into an unpalatable mush if you leave them together overnight.) Pack everything in the generic tupperware of your choice, throw in a stack of disposable plastic hex dishes, and you can set up some impressive outdoor dining in a matter of minutes.

If you don’t want to Google cold salad recipes, this fall you’ll be able to buy your very own copy of Wood for Sheep: The Unauthorized Settlers Cookbook and make yourself a tasty summer board from my recipes.

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You can find recipes for all of the hextastic goodness in Wood for Sheep: The Unauthorized Settlers Cookbook.