Lettuce, Apple, and Cucumber Salad

Inspired by my salad yesterday, today, too, I made a salad with hitherto unused ingredients - apples and cucumbers. You can prevent apples from going brown after you cut them by rubbing some lemon/lime juice on them.

Lettuce, Apple, and Cucumber Salad

Ingredients:

• 2 cups iceberg lettuce, chopped finely
• 1/2 a large apple, chopped
• 1 cucumber, sliced (skin on)
• 2 tablespoons black olives, chopped
• Handful of mint
• Tablespoon of olive oil
• Juice of two limes
• Handful of fennel leaves
• Handful of walnuts

To make:

• Chop and mix all the veggies.
• Juice the two limes - The juice of one of them will be poured over the chopped apples to prevent them from going brown.
• The juice of the other lime will be combined with the olive oil to make a dressing.
• Pour over the salad.
• Garnish with walnuts, mint and fennel leaves.

Subway Fix

Finally, a Subway sandwich that actually looks like the one on their posters!

Peas, Lettuce, and Fennel Salad

If you have been on my blog long enough, you’ll notice I rarely make a green salad – by habit, I must add some color by way of fruits or red peppers at the very least. Today, I decided to give my daily dose of peppers a rest. And used green peas, instead!

Ingredients:

• 1 cup green peas (frozen is fine)
• 2-3 cups of chopped iceberg lettuce
• 1 cup chopped pak choi leaves
• ½ cup of shaven fennel bulb (with leaves)
• 10 green olives
• 5-10 walnuts
• Dash of olive oil
• Juice of one lime

To make: 

• Combine the peas, lettuce, pak choi, and fennel.
• Make a dressing of olive oil and the lime juice.
• Pour over the salad. Let it rest for 2-4 hours.
• Add the walnuts on top for crunch.
  
  
  

What I Want Now: Ginger Candy

Crystallized ginger - so easy to make and I'd imagine it'd taste great.

Photo and recipe courtesy the Healthy Green Kitchen:

Beet and Bean Sprouts Burger

Milk solids. Two words that are increasingly cropping up on things I have bought. Two words that are making me question how I can in good faith call myself “100% vegan”?! A miniscule amount of milk isn’t the greatest sin in the world, but still.

First my cracker biscuits and now my store bought burger buns contain milk solids. What does ‘milk solids’ even mean?! And why the heck is it mindlessly added to everything? As a former non-vegetarian, I am just not used to scrutinizing food labels – It may be unhealthy, but there’s nothing on those food labels that would make me stop and go “Oh, I can’t buy this. This contains XXX”. That habit of mindlessly picking up stuff that I think should and ought to be vegan will have to be seriously managed.

But I believe in learning my lesson and moving on. I just don’t see the point of just throwing away a perfectly good burger bun that I already wasted my money on. I’ll eat it now, but will never buy the same brand again, and examine all burger bun food labels now that I am aware there might be milk solids. After all, this is a journey and I’m still learning – only about 3 months since going completely vegan. At least I do not consciously crave more obvious no-go items like meat and milk.

Anyhoo…there are a ton of vegan burgers that mimic various meats. I especially liked this burger recipe that uses beets to mimic meat. It looks great, but there is so much effort involved with making stock and cooking and grinding up various nuts and seeds. So, my version – not nearly as pretty or great tasting, for sure – uses beets and bean sprouts. You just grind it all up and deep fry the pattie. However, you do need some sort of flour or beans to hold the whole thing together because beets will start to shed water, and you – like me – risk having a runny pattie.

Beet and Bean Sprouts Burger

Ingredients:

For the pattie:

• 1 beet
• 1 cup mung bean sprouts
• ½ cup fried onions
• 1 teaspoon chilli powder
• ½ teaspoon curry powder
• Juice of half a lime
• Handful of coriander
• Corn starch or plain flour (if needed)
• Dash of semolina

Other trimmings:

• Burger bun
• Green chutney (coriander and chillies with some coconut)
• Tomatoes, sliced
• Lettuce, finely chopped
• Jalepeno peppers

To make:

• In a blender, blend together all the ingredients except corn starch/ plain flour.
• Make a pattie. If it’s too runny, add some corn starch or some sort of flour.
• Let the pattie rest in the fridge for 4-8 hours so that the wateriness goes away.
• Coat the pattie in semolina (or bread crumbs if you have them).
• Fry for 2-3 minutes on each side.

To assemble:

• Cut the burger bun and gently toast it on both sides.
• I added a green coriander and chilli chutney to my buns, and added tomato, lettuce, jalepenos.

Strawberry Lettuce Salad

For lunch today, a delightful sweet salad consisting of strawberries and lettuce, with maple adding to the sweetness.

Lettuce isn’t just a sweet and crunchy vegetable that makes salads appetizing, or the mandatory greens you add atop your burger! It’s one of the most nutrient-dense foods around, according to Dr. Joel Fuhrman. Nutrient density can also be understood as the ratio of the nutrient composition of a given food to the nutrient requirements of the human body. This, according to the eBook 'Profoundly Raw'. OK, as you see from the chart below, it’s nowhere close to the heavy weights kale and spinach, but would you rather eat a kilo of kale or lettuce?

Strawberry Lettuce Salad

Ingredients:

• 10-12 strawberries
• 2-3 cups of lettuce
• 10-12 green olives
• 1 cup of green pepper
• ½ cup of red pepper
• Tablespoon of maple syrup

To make:

• Tear up the lettuce - I used iceberg – into bite sized chunks.
• Chop up the peppers into little squares, and the strawberries you can leave whole or slice in half, depending on the size.
• Mix all the ingredients.
• Pour the maple syrup on top right before you want to eat the salad or the lettuce will start to wilt away.

 



Orange and Fennel Salad

Three ingredients – orange, fennel bulb, and maple syrup. Ready in a jiffy and makes for a delicious breakfast.

To make, you'll need one orange, half a fennel bulb, and a teaspoon of maple syrup. Just shave off shards of the fennel bulb; slice the orange horizontally to get thin round discs. Reserve a little orange juice and add that to the maple syrup to make the dressing. Combine, mix and tuck in!

Baked Sweet Potato Fries

Ever since I saw a sweet potato fries post on Foodgawker, I wanted to try my hands at making them at home. So, looking around on the Net, my version is an amalgam of this and this recipe. The original recipe is great, but adding garlic just makes a good thing even greater. I didn’t have garlic powder, so just used freshly minced garlic.

Sweet Potato Fries

Ingredients:

• 1 large sweet potato
• Teaspoon of rock salt
• 3-4 cloves of garlic
• 1 teaspoon of paprika/chilli powder
• Handful of corn starch
• 3 tablespoons of olive oil

To make:

Preheat your oven at the highest temperature available for 10-15 minutes.

Peel the skin off the sweet potato and slice the potato into French fry-sized slivers.

Smash up or grate the garlic into very tiny pieces.

Combine the oil, garlic, chilli powder, and salt to make a batter.

Dip each potato chip into the batter, coating well.

Lay the chips on a baking tray.

Dust some corn starch on top.

Bake the potatoes for 25-30 minutes or until the potatoes are done.