Spinach, Mushroom, and Tomato Salad

A quick salad with fresh, organic spinach, mushrooms suateed in garlic, and tomato, dressed in red wine vinegar, extra virgin olive oil and more garlic. Garnished with my new favorite ingredient - chives! My aversion to eating tomatoes raw is slowly and surely fading away!

Spinach, Mushroom, and Tomato Salad

Ingredients:

• 4-5 cups of chopped spinach
• 1 large tomato
• 12-15 button mushrooms
• 3 cloves garlic
• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• Dash of dry chives

To make:

• Chop your spinach and tomato into bite sized pieces, and slice your mushrooms into half.
• Heat a teaspoon pf olive oil in a pain, and add the mushrooms and thinly sliced garlic cloves.
• Sautee for 5 minutes or until brown.
• Add to the spinach and tomatoes.
• Make a dressing combining the remaining olive oil, red wine vinegar, and the garlic powder.
• Pour over the salad.
• Finish off with a flurry of finely chopped chive.

What I Want Now: Sautéed Spinach With Silken Tofu

Evan from The Wannabe Chef made a sautéed spinach with silken tofu dish, that just looks so inviting and wholesome! Finally, some good use for my remaining tub of silken tofu. His secret ingredients are nutmeg and cinnamon.

Photo and recipe courtesy of The Wannabe Chef:

Spinach, Pear, and Cherry Salad

To make prudent use of my expensive cherries, and my organic spinach, here's a dead simple salad that's easy to eat thanks to the fruit and water content. I also cheated a bit and added in a couple of sachets of Domino's oregano+salt seasoning.

Spinach, Pear, and Cherry Salad

Ingredients

• Couple handfuls of spinach
• About 10-15 large cherries
• 1 green pepper
• 1 pear
• 1 tablespoon of olive oil
• About a teaspoon of oregano flavored salt

To make:

• Wash an chop up the spinach, pear, and pepper.
• Deseed the cheries by chopping them in half.
• Combine the fruits and veggies.
• Add the oregano and salt to the olive oil, mix, and drizzle over the salad.
  
  
  

Lettuce Salad with Maple and Mulberry Dressing

You know I just had to try my maple syrup I bought yesterday! :)

Lettuce is such a delicious and easy to work with vegetable. You have to be a moron to totally wreck a recipe containing lettuce. And for some strange reason, I surmised that maple and miso would be a good combination. Don't laugh -I Googled it and yes, there are recipes combining those exact same ingredients. But lettuce is sweet - I didnt want to ruin it with miso's inherent saltiness. So, the miso+maple combo will have to wait. Maybe with the mung bean sprouts, sometime later this week. For now, let's just combine the sweet of the lettuce with the sweetness of my mulberries:

Lettuce Salad with Maple and Mulberry Dressing

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of iceberg lettuce
• 1.5 cups of spinach
• 1/2 a green pepper
• 1/2 a pomogranate
• Handful of mint
• About 10-15 mulberries

Dressing

• 5 mulberries
• 3 Teaspoons of maple syrup
• Dash of olive oil

To make:

Clean and chop the spinach, lettuce, pepper and mint.

Add the pomogranate and mulberries.

Crush with your bare hands the 5 mulberries for your dressing into the maple syrup and olive oil mixture. Mix and add to the salad. I typically dont have my salad dripping in dressing as I make my salads to last me the whole day and keeping them wilt-free and fresh is a bigger priority. If you're going to have the salad immediately, by all means make more of the salad dressing.

Have this within a reasonable amount of time - The lettuce leaves will start to wilt if you do not refrigerate the salad. Other than that - DELISH!

Zesty Spinach Salad 2

Well, this one's just another twist of my original zesty spinach salad recipe, since Mr. Spinach doesn't just eat itself and goes bad real quick.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of spinach
• 1 cup cabbage
• ½ a large pomegranate
• 1/2 a sweet lime
• 1 spring onion (onion, plus the entire green stalk)

Dressing:

• Teaspoon of olive oil
• Juice of half a sweet lime
• Roughly 10 black pepper corns
• Dash of basil

To make:
Wash and chop all the ingredients roughly the same size. Make the salad dressing and pour over the salad ingredients.  

Zesty Spinach Salad

Portion sizes are a bit of a joke with me – as I end up making way more than required quite often. Let’s just gloss over the fact that I end up throwing the remains of a perfectly good salad to go and buy, not one, but two Subway sandwiches each day over the course of this week. So, today I made a new rule - No buying outside stuff until my salad bowl is empty; after that you can eat what you want to your heart's content. But actually, I have been eating dinner on the go because I have relatives staying over at my place and I’d rather just have my dinner out of their sights, than be subjected to more mock taunts. “Why are you not eating meat?” “Whats wrong with cooking food?” “You are already thin enough, you don’t need to diet!” and “Well if you’re so health conscious, how come you smoke?” – All perfectly legit, but sometimes you just don’t want to have to explain to someone for the nth time.

So, today I made a bit less than usual. But I underestimated the appeal of fruits to spruce up a salad. Normally, my big bowl of salad lasts till about 7 PM, with me portioning it in 2-3 batches. But this salad with spinach, grapes, pine apple and pomegranate with a black pepper dressing was so delightful; I’ve polished off the whole bowl by lunch time.

Fruits are expensive, though – Rs 40 for one pomegranate! BTW, the last pomegranates I bought from the farmers market were organic. This one I bought yesterday was not. You can just tell by all that extra membrane/pith-y yellow stuff inside the pomegranate. My organic one was one giant ruby ball with almost no unnecessary yellow stuff in between that we need to sift through. This one I bought had a ton of it – adding to the weight (and hence the cost), plus the effort required on your part to clean the whole fruit.

Zesty Spinach Salad

Ingredients: 

• 2 cups of spinach
• 20-30 black grapes
• ½ a large pomegranate
• 1 cup of pine apple
• 1 spring onion (onion, plus the entire green stalk)

Dressing:

• Tablespoon of olive oil
• Juice of half a lime (mostly only to ensure my salad would stay good all day - Dont really need it)
• Roughly 15-20 black pepper corns

To make:

Wash the spinach thoroughly and chop it up into bite sized slivers.

Chop the spring onion and pine apple in roughly the same sized portions as the spinach.

Clean and peel the pomegranate to get to the red nuggets inside.

Mix all the salad ingredients.

Make a dressing of olive oil, lime juice and black pepper (ground up).

Pour evenly over the salad. Mix well.