A delicious vegan 10 minute summer salad made with only six ingredients. Vibrant, smooth, crunchy, sharp and full of awesome flavors, this artichoke avocado salad with alfalfa is bound to be a hit.

Recently D sent me an awesome article all about the future world of artificial intelligence. Naturally, being me, I quickly clicked on the link, and before even getting a chance to read the first sentence got sidetracked and started checking out the home page of the blog itself – Wait But Why.

My mind quickly darted towards the procrastination articles so I started my reading with Why Procrastinators Procrastinate.

As a serious hardcore procrastinator I needed to delve deeper into the subject. To save 2000 words of reading, the short takeaway is, that in a procrastinators mind there lives you, the rational being, and the instant gratification monkey, who wants to eat when it wants to eat, sleep when it wants and have fun when it wants.

This little monkey keeps the rational you from getting anything productive done because it quickly steers you away from the dreaded responsibilities of the day into the fun part of the day.

This has quickly opened my eyes. Before, I simply knew I had a hard time focusing, prioritizing and stay on track. Now I just know there’s a little monkey living in my head, constantly navigating me away from everything that needs to be done.

It is a daily battle. Scratch that, an hourly one. This recipe for example was meant to be shared weeks ago, but as always that monkey took me off target and here I am now.

I seriously envy those focused driven individuals who never have more than 2 tabs open in their browsers (I usually have 20), have organized folders in their Windows Explorer (mine are all over the place) and do not see their desktop overrun with sticky notes that take minutes to scroll through.

If you also can function at 100% on 6 hours of sleep, well then in my mind you might just be the ultimate being.

I unfortunately need my full 9 hours; I mean I can function on 7, just unhappily and grumpily – but who wants that? At 5 or 6 hours of sleep my level of proper functioning probably drops down to about 50%.

You see, I’ve already jumped all over the place, instead of properly introducing my new favorite salad – the artichoke avocado salad.

This is the ultimate summer meal. Nothing to cook, nothing tough or heavy to digest. Light, bright, green, summer.

Sometimes when I eat too many broiled artichokes they start to taste fennel-y to me? Does this happen to anyone else? Just me?

In this salad that never happens though. The artichoke are hearty and almost meaty, paired perfectly with a ripe creamy avocado, sharp bite of arugula, crisp cucumber and and stringy alfalfa sprouts.

The perfect one dish artichoke avocado salad if you ask me. A bit of chopping required – though nothing too fine, just a rough cut, and then toss everything together. As for the dressing? My all time favorite – vegan basil pesto.

I love love love to use a dollop of pesto as my salad dressing. Why not? The herbs are all there, the oil is there, the cheesey nutty flavor is there.

I’m telling you – pesto makes for the ultimate home made salad dressing and is the icing on the cake for this artichoke avocado salad.