The Really Big Salad or, Plants are Effing Amazing!

Salads should always be bigger than my entire head.

When the weather gets hot my eating habits tend to wander into the realm of being mainly raw, which for me means, green smoothies, king-sized salads and huge amounts of fresh fruit. I do include cooked, marinaded beans as well as grains and pasta in my salads (also occasional raw seeds, nuts or sprouts) quite regularly and I often eat oatmeal or homemade muesli in the morning, so I would say my hot weather eating habits are about 80% raw. I bulk up my calorie intake on busy days with bananas and dates, because well, they’re calorie dense and high carb (which is a good thing in my world) and yummy as all heck. Also, they make my brain stick this song on auto-repeat, which is always fun:

I’m not a big salad dressing person, but I do occasionally make a marinade or dressing for my salads (the rest of the time I use a squeeze of lemon, or a splash of rice wine or balsamic vinegar). Today’s dressing is a splash of vinegar, tossed in the blender with a handful of sundried tomatoes and some fresh garlic, rather than dressing my salad with this, I marinaded some beans in it and mixed those in.

Todays salad:

• Organic “super greens” salad green mix

• Sundried tomato marinaded  6 bean blend

• Cherry tomato halves

• Green onion

• Shredded cabbage

• Carrots

• Cucumber and zucchini chunks

• A big handful of fine cut flat leaf parsley

• A big handful of sugar snap peas

I just tossed all of this yum into a big bowl and violently attacked it with a fork and my terrifying canine teeth. Those poor defenseless plants still don’t know what hit them. What can I say, I’m a garden’s worth nightmare. I don’t really have any salad rules, I try to throw as many colours and textures into the bowl as I can, and I always try to add a big handful of fresh herbs or bitter greens, but really salads are just a fun, refreshing sort of free-form event for me.

Huge salads are a pretty affordable way to fill your nutritional needs and remind you how amazing it is that plants provide such an incredible variety of food options. People who’ve never incorporated plant-based meals into their lives really are missing out.

My Creamy Dill and Chickpea Half-Pasta Salad (low fat vegan).

My creamy chickpea half pasta salad.

I “invented” this great dish which I call “Half-Pasta Salad” a couple of years back, when I started being more aware of what I eat. I call this “Half-Pasta Salad” because it’s quite literally half pasta, and half salad. I used to serve this with a mayo-based dressing, but now that I’m more cautious about the amount of oil/fat I consume I invented this terrific chickpea based creamy dressing. The dressing is really easy to adapt to your own needs and tweaking the herbs etc is a great way to make this a more flexible, appealing dish. I also love this dressing as a sandwich spread, veggie dip etc.

Dressing:

• 1/2 cup cooked chick peas
• rice wine vinegar or lemon juice (enough to ensure the chickpeas blend nicely – adjust amounts for taste and texture)
• a splash of oil if you wish
• tamari to taste
• 1 tbsp grainy or dill Dijon
• 1 clove or more fresh garlic
• fresh or dried dill
• freshly ground pepper to taste (I like the blend of pink, white and black peppercorns)

1. Chop garlic into smallish pieces
2. Toss all ingredients into your blender and blend until it creates a sauce with a creamy sort of mayonnaise-like consistancy
3. Set aside.

Salad:

1. Chop 4 cups of your favourite veggies into small pieces. Place in a bowl with 1-2 cups chickpeas .
2. Mix dressing into the bowl with the veggies and set aside
3. Cook 4 cups of your favourite pasta , drain and cool completely under cold water.
4. Mix the cooked and drained cool pasta into the bowl with your veggies, chickpeas and dressing
5. Serve and enjoy.

Note: If you are not serving this salad immediately after making it, give it a good stir prior to serving to “re-activate” the creamy texture.

Cold Black Bean and Millet Salad

I don’t know what any of your grocery budgets look like, but right now mine is pretty darn seriously small. I have roughly 20 dollars a week to spend on fresh produce, so I’m pretty careful about what I buy, use and waste. This of course means that I’m also very carefully managing my pantry staples as well, so I try to make grains and beans ahead and incorporate them into multiple meals. Today I had leftover millet from yesterday and I’m not feeling much like cooking, so I made a really simple cold grain salad, loosely based off of this recipe. By “loosely based off” I mean I used the basic concept, and totally stole the dressing recipe.

My version has millet,corn, black beans, some salsa verde and kalamata olives I’m trying to use up, pepitas, cucumber, a ton of fresh parsley, and some frozen corn. I copied the dressing recipe exactly, but I suspect that the addition of the salsa verde will change the flavour profile pretty significantly. Accompanying this is a healthy dollop of The Veganomicon’s white bean aioli, which I am completely and utterly noming with every meal this week (holy garlic fix batdog).

 

Oil and Vinegar Potato Salad Recipe at Epicurious.com

 

Oil and Vinegar Potato Salad Recipe at Epicurious.com. <-(to see the original article please click this link)

I’m going to make this potato salad tonight (and pair it with my constant companion, the chickpea cutlet), but instead of red wine vinegar I’m going to use rice wine vinegar (I’m in the mood for sometime lighter tasting). It should be pretty tasty. I’ll likely tweak the heck out of the seasoning as usual, and cut waaaay back on the oil – 1/4 cup of olive oil might taste really good, but it’s way more than is healthy for a type two diabetic like myself.

My current budget allows me to center my meals around rice, beans, tofu, and inexpensive vegetables and fruits (potatoes, apples, carrots, beats, onions, celery, gai lan, bok choy, turnip, cabbage etc etc). For the next little while the recipes I post AND try will mostly be “peasant” style cooking, which is quite honestly my favourite style of cooking most of the time. It’s not as much fun to read about, or share, but it makes me happy to know that I’m eating the way that people in less industrialized countries do. My love of cooking and baking comes from studying hippie-made cookbooks so, rustic is pretty much my default style.

I was sad to be thinking about putting this blog on hold, until I realized that I can’t possibly be the only person out there who is trying to get by on a plant-based diet on a college student sized budget (speaking of which – I start college in September).

Yield:

Makes 4 to 6 servings

For more of a bite, add two
to three teaspoons of whole grain mustard
along with the olive oil.

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 pounds Yukon Gold potatoes (about 5 medium), unpeeled <- I only peel potatoes or carrots if I’m doing something “fancy”
• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 1/2 small red onion, very thinly sliced
• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh Italian parsley

Preparation:

Cook potatoes in large pot of boiling salted water until tender, about 30 minutes. Drain. Cool to just warm, 10 to 15 minutes; peel potatoes. Cut each potato in half, then cut into 1/3-inch slices.

Place warm potatoes in large bowl. Stir red wine vinegar and sugar in small bowl until sugar dissolves, then drizzle over potatoes. Toss to coat. Mix in onion slices. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Cool to room temperature.

Add olive oil and parsley to potatoes. Toss well and let marinate at least 20 minutes and up to 2 hours at room temperature.

“Millet Moo-Free Burger” Review

As promised I gave the Millet Moo-free Burger recipe a try this evening and they turned out really well. I didn’t have fresh rosemary or spelt flour, so I used dried oregano in place of the herb and combined 1/2 chick pea and 1/2 whole wheat flour in place of the spelt. I REALLY appreciate the fact that these are baked burgers instead of fried as I do try to keep added oils out of our meals as much as possible.

My mother and my boyfriend are both very picky about veggie foods and both are usually suspicious of new things and both of them LOVED these. My boyfriend actually ate three of these which is basically a standing ovation.

I made a double batch of these and served them with a large green salad and a table-full of condiments. These will be making a frequent appearance on our dinner table.