Mediterenean Quinoa Salad

Here's a fresh, simple, healthy and delicious salad, perfect for a hot summer day!
(No need to say more...just enjoy!)



For 2 approximately servings:
1/2-3/4 cooked quinoa
1 zucchini
3-4 mini peppers
1 cup cherry tomatoes, cut in half or whole if really small
1 cup green peas
2-3 green onions
1/4 cup fresh basil, roughly chopped
Salt&Pepper
Juice of 1 lemon
1/4-1/3 cup olive oil, or more

Cut the zucchinis in whatever shape you feel like(rounds, half-moons, or quaters, you decide!).
Chop the peppers into small pieces, as well as the green onions.
Cut the tomatoes, and sprinkle with salt so they release their juices and flavor!
If you use frozen peas, thaw them nicely in the micro-wave...(did I mention this salad is sooooo easy??!)
Mix all the veggies together, add the quinoa, basil, lemon juice and oil, salt and pepper to taste and that's it...



Add a nice crusty bread on the side if you wish and bon appetit!

Millet salad with Mediterranean flavors...

It's summer time, almost, so there will be a lot of salads coming on this blog. This is one I made a few days ago but kept the pictures for a later post...one week later. I have a full time job now, food-related, so my cooking/baking time as gone WAY down! But I'm still around...
So this salad was thrown together after looking in the fridge and grabbing whatever was in there:

1 zucchini
3-4 button mushrooms
1 clove garlic
Leftover millet from last week "bread of the week"(about 1/2 cup was left...)
2-3 big pieces sundried tomatoes
BIG chunk feta cheese
about 1/4 cup roasted UNsalted sunflower seeds.

I started by sauteeing the zucchini, mushrooms and garlic in olive oil, with oregano(lots of it!!), salt, pepper, and paprika.
In a big bowl I mixed the cold millet, feta, sundried tomatoes and sunflower seeds with cracked black pepper. Didn't add salt because feta is pretty salty already...
I threw in the hot sauteed zucch's and 'shrooms to make the cheese soften a bit.
I then mixed in 1 tablespoon lemon juice and 2-3 tablespoons olive oil.

So fresh and delicious.



Only thing missing is a nice cold glass of white wine...

Jamie's Coleslaw

I LOOOOOVE Jamie Oliver. I love his food, his ideas, the simplicity of his recipes and his enthusiasm about cooking. And this Food Revolution he's got going right now in the States is amazing. I really hope people listen to him because he's right about everything. This obesity issue is getting out of control here in North America, something has to change.
In walks Jamie Oliver...
Anyway...
I finally got his book called "Cook with Jamie". It's a really nice one, with nice pictures, tips and of course amazing recipes!
I usually don't follow recipes to the T, I buy cook books for inspiration mostly. Like this one here. It's a simple coleslaw, but I got the inspiration from Jamie's book. And it's really nice. I usually don't go for creamy slaw, I love vinegary type dressings but I had to try!

Start by thinly chopping half a green cabbage. Then shred 2-3 carrots, 1 apple and finely slice a few green onions(the book called for red onions, but I only had green so...). Chop a big handfull of fresh parsley, add to the rest of the ingredients with salt and pepper.
Add 2-3 spoonfulls of light mayo, a squeeze on dijon and the juice of a lemon.
Mix it all up nicely and enjoy!
It went really well with my cranberry-orange bread!!



I bet raisins or dried cranberries would be really good in here too!

Roasted Beet Salad with Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette.

Beets is one of my favorite vegetables, but I rarely eat them. I almost never buy canned veggies or pickled stuff, so when I pick up beets at the grocery store it's always in a bag, or sometimes in a bunch with the leaves still on. But it takes so long to cook! And I seem to always forget I have them. They sit in the bottom drawer and end up rotting. Tonight I had to throw out half of the bag 'cause of blue stuff growing on them. Yuk. But I salvaged the rest and cooked them all. The easiest way obviously to cook those gems are in boiling water, but like anything else, they end up losing a lot of nutrients with that water. So I baked them in the oven. It takes around 45-50 minutes, for cubes of about 2 cm. in diameter. All you gotta do is peel, cube, lay on foil with about 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil, salt, pepper, and some herb(i used thyme. it goes with everything!). Fold up the foil around the beets just a little, leaving a big opening at the top, and bake at 400F for, like I said, 45-50 minutes. So delicious!
For this salad I used baby romaine, green onions, feta(surprise, surprise...), flat-leaf parsley and chopped roasted pecans.
For the dressing, I made a honey-balsamic vinaigrette:

1 TBSP honey
small squeeze dijon mustard (just to help bind everything...)
1 TBSP balsamic vinegar
1/2 TBSP lemon juice
2-3 TBSP olive oil
cracked black pepper

I mixed all the greens and feta and nuts, with some of the dressing, and added the still kinda hot beets on top so everything kinda whilted and warmed-up a bit. Poured the rest of the vinaigrette, big squeeze of lemon juice and more pepper.



I should definetly eat beets more often...

*on a side note, i've been trying different settings on my camera, so it's totally normal those 2 pictures have different lightings... :)

More than just coleslaw...

Cabbage is one of the heathiest vegetable. Vitamin C, folic acid, cancer-fighting agents, etc. And the red is twice as high in vitamin as the green cabbage. The brighter the food the better. That's what the nutritionists always say, right? Red purple, bright red, dark green, orange, we should all eat food of bright colors! All from nature of course because red jelly beans don't count.. :)
I bought a red cabbage a few days ago, because I try to eat as colorful as possible, but also because it's great in salads. And the great thing about this type of salad is that it stays good for quite a while even with the dressing in it. It even gets better with time...Plus, the cabbage itself keeps for a while in the crisper. I don't know if it's the "proper" place to store it but it won't go bad for a few weeks, wrapped in plastic in the bottom drawer.
So at first I was gonna make just coleslaw with ONLY that cabbage and a red wine vinegar dressing, but I got carried away and added a bunch of other good stuff.



Ingredients(don't know the exact quantities, I didn't measure...):
Red cabbage, carrots, celeri, yellow pepper, flat-leaf parsley, golden raisins.
Sadly I was out of green onions, otherwise there would have been green onions in there.

Dressing:
1 TBSP dijon
1-2 TBSP maple syrup
2 TBSP red wine vinegar
2 TBSP orange juice
Extra virgin olive oil, however much you'll need...
For dressings I usually mix everything except the oil until it's homogenised, then add the oil while whisking and emulsify slowly until it looks good enough, and adjust it if need be.

This is so much better than just plain coleslaw, the raisins bring some sweetness to it, and the o.j. in the dressing brightens everything up.

Try it you won't be disapointed!

Spinach Salad with Peas and Feta and other good stuff.

This salad is awesome. It has a lot of my favorites in it: spinach, feta, sundried tomatoes...I've been making this a lot lately. A few secondary ingredients change from time to time, depending on what I got, but it pretty much always tastes the same.



I really like using baby spinach in salads. They come in packs already washed, so it's quick. And the nutrion values of that leafy green is no secret, right?
If you've been following this blog you know by now how much I love feta and sundried tomatoes, so I won't get into that again.. ;) Lots of those in this salad!
And then there's the green peas. Lovely frozen green peas ready to use anytime in anything, rich in fiber and protein. Great for vegetarians.
What else is in there?? Green onions, leftover cooked millet from a few nights ago (grains in salalds is genius! throw in some barley or rice or couscous, combined with the peas it's a complete protein!!), and some cucumber also is in here.

For the vinegrette it's pretty simple:
*1 tsp each of honey and dijon mustard (could be more, just taste and adjust to your tastebuds!!)
*1 TBSP each of lemon juice and red wine vinegar
*5-6 TBSP extra virgin olive oil.
(i like vinegrettes very vinegery so I always use less oil than the traditional 1 part vinegar 3 parts oil ratio.)
Mix in everything but the oil until well combined, add olive oil 2 TBSP at a time and whisk with a fork or one of those mini whisk thingy until it's all nicely emulsified...add salt and pepper to taste. This will be enough for a couple of BIG salalds or 3-4 small ones.
Homemade dressing are so easy to make and so much better than the chemical filled storebought stuff!



Tastes like summer....