Tag Archives: salad

Kale to the chief (of salads)

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In lieu of Meghan’s Green Smoothie Cleanse (going 100% smoothie for three days just didn’t feel right for me this time) I decided to try raw, vegan for three days, along with going to bed early and rising early. [Full disclosure: tomorrow's dinner won't be raw.] I didn’t think that raw would be much of a challenge but I’m surprised at how much I do cook.

Breakfast and lunch are easy because many days I eat raw until dinner anyway and not because I’m trying to eat that way. I drink a smoothie for breakfast (if you look at my Twitter feed to the right you’ll see my “smoothie of the day”) and often a salad for lunch. Salads are the easiest meal to make: Throw a bunch of ingredients into a bowl or container. Toss or shake. Drizzle with vinaigrette, seasoning or dressing of choice, in my case often olive or walnut oil with a squeeze of lemon. (My mom takes nothing but lemon on her salad.)

Even when I don’t bring my own salad I have two salad places within walking distance of work: A Freshii – with whom I have issues but I eat there anyway – and “Sushi and salad”, a place with a salad bar and, you guessed it (I hope), sushi.

Raw vegan chocolate banana pudding topped with a banana slice, a date & pink Himalayan sea salt

Last night’s dinner presented a minor challenge: My friend Tema of Post-Challahism (she promises her first blog post will go up soon) picked up my CSA items on Tuesday and we haven’t been able to coordinate transfer. Because I was waiting on it I hadn’t gone shopping. What to do? See what vegetables I do have and pull out my spiral slicer! After attempting eggplant (FAIL) and cucumber (semi-fail) I sliced a sweet potato and topped the potato and cucumber “noodles” with garlic scape pesto that I’d made earlier in the week. Then there was dessert: Raw chocolate banana pudding. I don’t usually eat dessert but I craved something. It was so rich that I could only eat a couple of spoonfuls (okay, so I licked the remains out of the blender first – well, not directly).

Today’s breakfast was a minor challenge. I was completely out of greens this morning, and I’m trying to go raw this weekend. Trader Joe’s Super Green Drink subbed in a pinch. Though powder, it’s full of great ingredients, all organic. It was added to 1 peach, 1/2 banana, walnuts, cacao nibs and maple syrup. Lunch? I didn’t really have a lunch. I had a couple bites of a Lara bar when I got hungry while waiting to go into an appointment.  When I arrived home a couple hours later I ate some watermelon that I bought at The Healthy Butcher this afternoon.* Tasty and hydrating and tastes like summer.

Curly kale

Image via Wikipedia

Dinner was a little easier to plan: After buying to kinds of kale this morning at the farmer’s market, the decision was made to make kale salad, and soon.  What I made was variation of this recipe.  See kale’s health benefits.

Kale salad

  • 1/4 cup wakame (I had no arame. I don’t know if wakame has a similar nutritional profile as arame but they’re both sea vegetables.
  • A bunch of curly and dinosaur kale. Not an official measure “bunch”, and not the equivalent to the amount that was contained in the twist tie, but a quantity that filled a large colander.
  • Sweet potato and cucumber (see notes above)
  • 2 carrots, spiral sliced
  • 1/2 avocado
  • Hemp seeds sprinkled over top

Dressing (below is basically the recipe I used but adjusted the measurements. See the original recipe for specifics):

  • 2/3 cup olive oil (I used 1/3 cup)
  • 1/4 cup rice vinegar (I probably used close to that much because I always forget that it pours fast)
  • 1 T soy sauce (I didn’t measure)
  • 1 T grainy mustard (I didn’t measure this either)
  • 2 cloves garlic (used 1 clove)
  • 1/4 cup cilantro  (I used a few bits that I had left, barely a tablespoon)
  • 1/4 cup green onions
  • salt/black pepper to taste (I only used salt)
  • toasted sesame seeds (I didn’t measure)

I also added

  • 1 garlic scape
  • A small bit (a couple of teaspoons?) of sesame oil
  • a small handful of goji berries

Directions

See the original recipe.

I followed pretty closely. For the dressing I added the mustard last and blended at the blender’s lowest setting. It seemed like a waste of grainy mustard to pulverize it. As for steaming the kale, I gave it a very light steaming. Yes, that’s not raw, and yes I contemplated that, but I have trouble chewing raw kale.  Adding dressing to the wakame actually had a nice effect, and I tossed the salad with my hands as I sometimes do to incorporate the dressing more thoroughly. I like prepping food with my hands. It adds to the sensory experience of cooking. As I tweeted, my kale salad kicked other salads’ butts.

I only made enough for one serving but the ingredients for the next time are pretty much prepped. Kale is washed and torn and wakame soaked. I’m thinking Monday lunch.

*By the way, at the Healthy Butcher, I bought nothing that required butchering. The store is so much more than meat and fish.

Eat well, be well.

Breakfast that goes down smooth(ie)

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As mentioned previously, I’ve been reading The Raw Food Detox Diet by Natalia Rose after buying it second hand at ABC Books. I’m at the beginning of part 3 of 5 in the book. I won’t go into details about the book right now (I’d like to do a more dedicated post in the future), but I intend to put it into practice short term as a cleanse and then decide how much of the principles I want to adopt longer term. The book reminded me about starting the day with fruit and the quick digestion time of fruit. Usually my breakfast routine consists of bringing oatmeal ingredients (oats and additives such as nuts, seeds and dried fruit) to work in a container, nuking it around 9:30am and eating it throughout the morning. Today I decided to forgo my usual oatmeal breakfast and begin my day out with fruit.

Problem is, I don’t have much fruit at home right now. It’s on my shopping list. What I do have, are apples that I bought in the fall and stored in Debbie Meyer Green Bags that I bought at Canadian Tire (most of the apples were still good months later), and frozen bananas.

This morning before work I made a fruit smoothie and drank a glass. It gave me lots of energy until hunger set in and I drank the second cup, brought to work in a Magic Bullet cup with lid. Smoothies are great. They’re easy and super-nutritious. Meghan had her Green Smoothie Cleanse last week, and my buddy SDM of In the Weeds has been blogging about his daily concoctions at work. I’m envious of his access to fruit, and the varieties of it.

Here is what I made this morning:

In my Magic Bullet (using the blender) I combined

  • 1 apple, cored and chopped but mostly unpeeled.
  • 1 frozen banana thawed a little bit because frozen bananas are solid (I know, one once attacked my foot and won).
  • Half a lemon peeled but not juiced, as much pith removed as I could.
  • Approx 1 tablespoon of ground flax seeds.
  • Coconut water (bought in a tetra pack).
  • Regular water.

The nuttiness of the agave provided great flavour. It was an awesome smoothie, one I’ll repeat until I buy more fruit. I correctly guessed that the coconut would taste good with apple and banana but I didn’t realize how much flavour the hazelnut would impart or how good it would be. I could use less next time.

I’m a fan of Vega products.  The Barleens Greens are new, bought  on Saturday after scrutinizing product labels. I tried drinking it in water on Monday and didn’t like it, so I’ll keep using it in smoothies. When I run out I might try the Berry version. I had a bottle of Barleens cinnamon-flavoured flax oil last year. While I found the taste too strong on its own, it was good on oatmeal with honey.

I did bring oatmeal to work today but didn’t eat it. I drank the first smoothie around 8:15am, the second in mid-morning (10? 10:30?) by 11:30 I got hungry. I don’t get hungry at noon like other people because I graze on my oatmeal all morning and the slow release carbs get me going. However, it’s almost 12:30 and I’m ready for a salad.

Smoothies are definitely a way to help stay hydrated and keep things easy on the digestive system, which I taxed on Tuesday evening with breaded tofu fingers (like chicken wings) and a grain-based veggie burger that was more dense than expected. By making little changes to what we eat and drink, even if they don’t become habitual, we can change our health. Going back to the Raw Food Diet, and I’ll get more into this another time, I’d like to try eating all raw until dinner time or mostly raw, with salads topped with sprouted grains or eggs and/or cheese (but not grains and one of the others because they’re poor combinations for digestion, while vegetables can combine with anything). I think I could do quinoa on my salads even though it’s technically cooked.

Lunch today is what remained in a box of salad (a box of Earthbound Farms salad appears to yield 4 meals worth of salad), the last of my cucumbes and baby carrots from the fridge at work and the last of the can of sliced beets that I opened yesterday. I figured that if I was using up the salad I may as well use up everything that goes on it and on Fridays I like to eat out so I’ll stock the fridge again on Monday. As per my usual this week, the dressing is a squeeze of lemon (used that up too and there wasn’t much left) and a drizzle of walnut oil.