This healthy tuna salad with veggies is a perfect easy lunch or simple dinner. Carrot, celery, and apple give this crunchy tuna salad its crispness, and making the tuna salad with cranberries also adds to this sweet and savory meal. Onion and garlic powders ramp up the flavors without adding extra chopping time (or watery eyes), and serving options are endless!
Want to stay healthy and lower carb? Serve this tuna salad with celery sticks, or eat it straight out of a bowl, like me. If you’d miss the bread, though – like Cory – this healthy veggie tuna salad makes a quick and easy tuna salad sandwich, or you can just dip crackers into the mixture for an easy healthy lunch in minutes.
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Why we love this Veggie-Loaded Crunchy Tuna Salad:
It’s soooo quick and easy!
Seriously, all you have to do is chop your veggies and apples; then mix in the cranberries, tuna, spices, and mayo. That’s it. You’re done! For maximum flavor, we recommend letting it all chill and meld for about an hour, but we’ve eaten it plenty of times as soon as we’ve made it; it’s still delicious!
It’s a Healthy Tuna Salad!
With the tuna, carrots, celery, and apple, you’re getting some great nutrients, and while the cranberries do add some sugar and sometimes oil, you can swap out traditional dried cranberries for oil-free apple-juice sweetened versions or even plain dried cranberries with nothing added. These will lessen the sweetness, but it’ll still be delicious.
Also, we kept the mayo to a minimum, just enough to get that creamy texture without having globs of it in the tuna salad. I’m not a huge mayo fan anyway, so I kept this healthy tuna salad lighter on mayonnaise.
Ingredients are Cheap and Often On-Hand
You know how carrots and celery tend to linger, sad and forgotten, at the bottom of the refrigerator crisper drawers, right? (Or is that just me?) We buy bags of carrots and bunches of celery for a variety of recipes (or because we think we’ll eat veggie sticks… sometimes we actually do, I promise…), but then we inevitably end up with a few leftovers.
Tuna cans last forever, especially if you buy them in bulk at Costco, thinking to yourself “They’re so much cheaper per can this way, and they don’t take up that that much space in the pantry!” which is admittedly true but becomes less relevant when you use that same logic to buy a dozen other ingredients in bulk as well. Oh well, it means we’ve got canned goods for lots of recipes on hand at all times!
So now you can make something of those on-hand ingredients! This sweet and savory tuna salad is the perfect way to use up those leftover veggies, and since we have apples on hand almost year round, I thought we should make this tuna salad with apples (and cranberries!) too. After all, I do like a little sweetness in just about everything.
Meal-Prep Friendly, and even Make Ahead!
I know that sounds unlikely; after all, once opened, tuna only lasts three or four days in the fridge. However, you CAN go ahead and chop up your ingredients and mix everything else together in advance if you’d like. Then it’s just a matter of adding tuna (or tuna and mayo if you want to wait on that part too), and you’ve got lunch whipped up in no time.
Also, if you’ve seen our Apples with Honey and Peanut Butter Dip recipe, you know that we love our Kyocera Ceramic Knives, which allow you to chop apples in advance without the apples browning. No need to add lemon juice or vinegar; just chop or slice your apples with a true, fully ceramic knife (not a metal bladed knife with ceramic coating on the sides), and you can keep apple slices for a week in the fridge without any major browning! It’s pretty awesome.
Serving Suggestions:
This crunchy tuna salad recipe makes a super simple meal for the family or an easy lunch for several days. Get creative, and enjoy your healthy lunch idea!
-Between Bread – Sweet and Savory Healthy Tuna Salad Sandwich
-Serve with celery sticks and crackers as dippers, as pictured (Here are the glass bento box style containers we often use for lunches, though we don’t recommend actually packing crackers in there if you’ll refrigerate for any length of time, as they’ll get soggy.)
-Open-faced sandwich style on flatbread
-Eat straight up with a spoon!
Perfect Sides for your Healthy Tuna Salad with Apples:
We like to eat this with some fruits or veggies on the side when we want a little heartier meal:
-Veggie Sticks with dip (celery, carrot, radish, broccoli, etc.)
This healthy tuna salad with veggies is a perfect easy lunch or simple dinner. Carrot, celery, and apple give this crunchy tuna salad its crispness, and making the tuna salad with cranberries also adds to this sweet and savory meal. Onion and garlic powders ramp up the flavors without adding extra chopping time (or watery eyes), and serving options are endless!
Chop vegetables and apple. (I prefer a small chop because i like to get more of everything in each bite).
Mix all ingredients.
Allow flavors to meld in the refrigerator for an hour for best flavor. (It’s still delicious if you don’t have time for this!).
Serve between bread, on flatbread, with celery sticks or crackers to dip, or just eat it out of the bowl!
Need a Healthy Sweet Treat Dessert to Finish off Your Meal?
Stick to your healthy habits while still enjoying a little hint of sweetness with these clean eating desserts, the perfect sweet finish to your healthy tuna salad lunch.
Do you have a favorite, healthy go-to lunch recipe? Do you take a break for lunch, or are you a work luncher? Let us know in the comments, make sure you subscribe, and remember to follow us on Pinterest too!
