This Supermarket Slaw Is the *New* Green Goddess Salad

Welcome to ! This month, we’re featuring Melissa Ben-Ishay’s latest cookbook . The founder of , a bakery specializing in bite-sized cupcakes and macarons, Melissa shares her favorite nourishing meals to devour before reaching for dessert. One of those includes the hearty, satisfying supermarket slaw recipe we’ve included below.

Melissa Ben-Ishay is always after the perfect bite. She mastered it more than 15 years ago with the miniature cupcakes that propelled her dessert company . But in September of 2021, the baker took to TikTok to share her recent obsession: a micro-chopped Green Goddess salad boasting a trio of vegetables and vibrant green dressing. Melissa scooped it up with tortilla chips and it flooded the internet. “I never expected it to become as popular as it did,” she says. However, millions of people across the world agreed—it really was the perfect bite.

Now we have that viral recipe to thank for an entire book brimming with wholesome, flavorful dishes. “In a lot of ways, the Green Goddess gave me permission to write this cookbook filled with the savory recipes I love so much that I make them every day,” she writes. Admittedly, Come Hungry isn’t the book you’d expect from a dessert baker. Rather than sugar and butter, it stars and dozens of imaginative ways to eat them.

The pages boast satisfying toasts, hearty salads (the Green Goddess only scratches the surface), , and nourishing family meals, all based on Melissa’s food philosophy: “If you eat nourishing food at mealtime, you can absolutely indulge in dessert every day.” Melissa certainly isn’t one to skip dessert. “I have to have a little something sweet after every meal, even if it’s just a handful of chocolate chips,” she says. Her current fixation is a Baked by Melissa cookie dough-stuffed cupcake, and who can blame her?

But at lunch and dinner, Melissa is more apt to toss together a simple salad or top sourdough pizza dough with veggies from her latest farmers’ market visit. “I always stop to get microgreens (especially micro cilantro) and the mushrooms are hard to turn down. In summer, I can’t get enough of grape tomatoes—I always look for the reddest, hardest ones. These are perfect for snacking on, tossing in olive oil and spices, and marinating with garlic,” she says. In the book, she employs things like homemade dressings, freshly chopped herbs, nuts and seeds, and bits of salty cheese to lend flavor and texture to her dishes.

Melissa’s healthful approach to mealtime stems from her husband Adi. She herself grew up with no shortage of family cooks, but it was her in-laws that taught her a different way to eat. She remembers the trip to Israel when she first met Adi’s family and the small plates, pita, and that overtook the dinner table. When she and Adi began cooking together, “I learned how to make things creamy without dairy (nutritional yeast) and how to brighten flavors in just about anything (lemon juice),” Melissa explains. Today, it has become her standard.

The supermarket slaw recipe we’ve shared below is the ultimate example of Melissa’s perfect bite. Chock-full of broccoli, edamame, corn, chicken, pancetta, and crunchy coleslaw, and tossed in a zippy homemade dressing, it’s a genius combination of “homemade and ready-to-go ingredients,” she says, “which is great for a last-minute party dish or for a busy mom to throw together.”