Healthy workday salads

I have a fetish for salads and particularly towards winter, when the best of salad greens are available, it's a daily indulgence. Of late, I have been trying to reduce carbs in my diet and eat more protein, for health reasons, due to an auto immune condition I have - Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Quinoa, while expensive both in terms of cost and carbon consumption, is a great addition to the diet for its rich micronutrient profile, including magnesium and phosphorus. It also adds dietary fiber, so a win-win.

I find it easy to set a fixed menu for lunch at the office - helps my cook by shortcutting the decision making process, and the time consuming part of the prep can be done one time. So we made the quinoa at the beginning of the week and refrigerated it, similarly with the chickpeas and roasted pumpkin. To add variety, I just changed up the salad dressing through the week. So putting together the salad is, ironically, a piece of cake!

Ingredients for one serving:
1 cup quinoa, soaked and cooked
1/2 cup cooked chickpeas
1 cup pumpkin, oven roasted with a little olive oil
1 apple, sliced chunkily
1 spring onion
1 carrot, grated thick
1/2 cup pomegranate
1 cucumber, deseeded and chopped into chunks
Handful of coriander leaves
1/2 cup halved walnuts

Dressing:
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp honey ( depending on your sweet tooth, you can add a little more)
1.5 tsp kasundi (Bengali grainy mustard which I love)
Juice of 1 small lime
Himalayan rock salt to taste

Whip together the olive oil and mustard into an emulsion, with a fork. Add the honey and lime juice until it combines well.

For an office lunch, you can pack the dressing separately and add it just before eating.

Changes you can ring:
Ingredients:
I'm on a detox from various Hashimoto's triggers so avoiding tomatoes, capsicum, baingan, dairy etc. If you don't have any such dietary restrictions, feel free to add those veggies. A few lettuce or rocket leaves wouldn't go amiss either.

Feta, or blue cheese if you like, it are great additions

I had planned to add sunflower seeds but the pack I had bought turned out to have worms - blech! Flax seeds are also a good addition, but add them just before eating. Pine nuts also taste great




















Dressing:
Apart from the dressing above, a simple pounded garlic, lime juice and rock salt combination also tastes very fresh. If you're using kala chana, you can add chaat masala and lime juice.

My favourite is Tahini dressing:
1/2 cup hung curd
1 tbsp tahini
1 green chilli
1 tsp sugar
Salt to taste
Small handful of coriander leaves

Fling everything into a blender and blend until smooth. Top your salad with this just before eating. Ps. If you're tempted to skip the sugar - don't. It adds an interesting complexity to the flavour. You can add garlic and cumin if you like, but it tastes just as good without.

Potato Salad

I love potatoes in almost any form ( except raw :)). One of my favourite dishes from childhood has been one for potato raita - a soft, creamy, gentle tasting one that serves as a poignant contrast to the often more robust taste of Indian food. It uses one of my favourite vegetables, tastes great and yet light, and goes well with anything, from rotis to bread - it makes a great sandwich filling - to saaru anna or a plain dal and rice. And as I discovered when I started cooking, it's easy and fast to make.

Ingredients:

4 Boiled, peeled potatoes (I count 1 potato per head)

1 cup homemade plain yogurt

2-3 green chillies (to taste), cut into 1 cm segments

1 tsp oil

1 tsp urad dal

1 tsp mustard seeds ( black)

Handful curry leaves

Handful minced coriander leaves for garnish

Salt to taste

Break the potatoes into irregular pieces by hand, but don't mash them. In a small wok, heat the oil. Pop in the mustard seeds and let them start spluttering. Add the green chillies and the urad dal. Wait till the urad dal starts browning a little and add the curry leaves. Take off the heat and pour over the potatoes. Add the yogurt and salt and mix. Top with the coriander leaves and cool in the refrigerator for half hour or more before serving.

To make this into a yummy sandwich spread, use Greek yogurt or hung yogurt instead of plain yogurt: hang a cup and a half of yogurt in a thin muslin cloth with a weight on top until all the liquid drains out. Eat within 4-5 hours or else it'll start tasting sour.

To experiment with this, you can add a small quantity of minced garlic, or to perk it up some chopped spring onions. A tiny amount of mustard can be added to give it a little kick, too.

This is my entry for this weekend's Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted by Chriese of Almond Corner.

Ching Chong salad

This is my entry for The Heart Of The Matter.

I love salads, as any of you who've frequented this blog would know. And in winter in Delhi, it's impossible for anyone to remain untempted by the variety of lovely, fresh vegetables spilling over in the markets. But I also constantly need variety and for some time now have been wondering how to impart a Chinese flavour to a salad without necessarily using Chinese vegetables like Pak Choy and bean sprouts. Then I was watching Kylie Kwong's China tour on Discovery Travel and Living and later, Jamie Oliver, and but naturally, got inspired.

I decided to make the dressing very Chinese in flavour while retaining the salad vegetables I love. It's easy and a refreshing new variation on the same old olive oil vinaigrette. Awesome! The name of the salad comes from popular Indian cinema nods to China, in which 'Chinese' characters say something that sounds vaguely Chinese but isn't.

Ingredients:

Salad vegetables. I used lettuce, torn into bite-sized pieces - and I mean bite-sized. I hate when restaurants ( or people) use whole leaves in salad - they don't absorb the dressing very well and it's very hard to fork them into your mouth! Red radish cut into quarters. Halved cherry tomatoes. The white part of spring onions, diced. Julienned red and yellow bell pepper. Cucumber, peeled and diced. Peas. Green beans, cut into 2 inch batons and parboiled. Broccoli florets, steamed lightly. You can chill the prepared vegetables until just before you want to serve the salad.

For the dressing:

1 tablespoon sesame seeds, dry-roasted

1 tablespoon peanut oil

2 cloves garlic

1 bunch coriander leaves

1 inch piece of ginger, peeled and cut into fine batons

The green part of spring onions, finely chopped

1/2 tablespoon of jaggery, grated

Soy sauce to taste

Juice of 1 lime

1 green chilli, grated ( yes, I mean grated, so the seeds stay on the outside and only the fragrant chilli goes in the salad)

Pound the garlic, coriander and green spring onions together in a mortar. Put the paste into a bowl and add the oil, soy sauce, chilli, jaggery, lime juice and ginger. Keep aside to marinate for about half an hour.

To assemble: Put all the vegetables into a large salad bowl. Pour the dressing on top and then add the sesame seeds. Mix with your hands ( might sound icky but I find the ingredients get mised more evenly by hand than with salad spoons) and serve.

Greek Salad

I'm a big lover of salads. South Indian style, with finely cut vegetables, some soaked lentils, coconut, topped with a tadka or Western style, with a vinaigrette dressing. One of my favourite salads is the Greek style salad, with lettuce, cucumber, onions, tomatoes and feta cheese in olive oil and vinegar or lemon. Flavours, the Italian restaurant at Defence Colony in Delhi does one of the best Greek Salads I've ever had, fresh, bursting with flavour and plentiful in the vegetables. Last year, when we holidayed in Greece, I was really looking forward to having lots of Greek salad. However, much to my dismay, it turned out to be a real disappointment. The salads had an assortment of vegetables alright, but the feta cheese was just put on top of the vegetables in a huge, thick slab, rather than being cut into smaller cubes which then mixed with the vegetables and created a unified flavour. The olive oil too tended to be rather heavy.

I love making Greek salad at home through out Delhi winters. You get a great supply of salad vegetables and these days any good grocery store will provide Danish feta cheese in cartons. It makes a good, filling appetiser which is great since I'm always looking for healthy and low-cal recipes. The kids love it too and it's a versatile style of salad since it can accommodate almost any salad veggies you'd like to use.

Last night we had one of my variations on the theme:
Ingredients
1 head of lettuce, washed in icy-cold water, dried and hand-torn into bite-sized pieces
2 green bell peppers, cut into thin strips
2 tomatoes, cubed
2 spring onions, chopped fine
Walnuts, half cup, broken into halves
Raisins, quarter cup
Italian extra virgin olive oil, 1 tablespoon
Juice of half - 1 lemon ( to taste)
Feta cheese, a 4 inch by four inch slab, about hald cm thick, cut into small pieces
Assemble all the vegetables, nuts and raisins together. Mix the oil and lemon juice in a cup, whisking well to ensure it's well-blended and pour over the vegetables. Add the feta cheese and mix everything together. In case the feta is extra-melty, as Danish feta tends to be, you can mix it with the oil and lemon juice and whisk all three together to make a smooth dressing.
You can ring any number of changes on this theme - replace the walnuts with pine nuts, use grapes instead of raisins, walnut oil instead of olive oil, add baby corn, red and yellow bell peppers, fresh green peas, steamed asparagus spears, even steamed green beans...If you find the feta too salty, you can also blend it with a bit of yoghurt.

Rocking Rocket

Rocket is one of my favourite salad greens. The minute I see it on a menu, I'm all over it, but it's a little hard to find at local vegetable markets. Last weekend, I was lucky enough to find a big bunch of fresh rocket which I immediately grabbed, and then wondered what I could do with it.

I have a favourite salad at Diva with Rocket and Parmesan so I decided to try and re-create that. I decided to keep the salad simple and pared down so I could truly savour the wondefrul taste of the rocket leaves. All I wanted to accompany the greens were a few cherry tomatoes, halved, and some sliced red onions. I was all out of Parmesan so settled for Edam shavings.

I mixed up a standard vinaigrette - olive oil, white wine vinegar, a dash of mustard and some powdered sugar and poured it over the salad leaves and vegetables. I topped that with thin shavings of the Edam - I still think Parmesan would have worked better because it's harder and saltier, but Edam was pretty good too. And then I thought the salad was missing a little something so I halved a few walnuts and added those to the mix.

The salad was - Rocking! The textures complimented each other beautifully, and the vinaigrette helped bring out the taste of the peppery, astringent rocket leaves even better. Definitely a salad I will be making any time I find rocket...

Light meals

Yesterday we decided to have an advance New Year's celebration dinner with my parents, leaving today free to PARTY!!! We'd had a rather filling meal at my aunt-in-law's house at lunch time, including a wonderful Black carrot halwa which I'm going to try out asap and blog about, and was totally awesome. Keeping our full stomachs in mind, mom and dad cooked up a great but light meal for us.

That included my favourite starter - salad - with mom's famous vegetable dip. This is a scrumptious dip of which no amount is enough. In fact, yesterday I got to thinking what all we could use it for, including as a sandwich spread, among other uses, or even with hot baingan pakoras. It also works well with kids who can scarf down any amount of crunchy fresh veggies or toast with this spread on it. My kids were in seventh heaven with salad, which they love, and a dahi-based dip.

Mom's famous yoghurt dip

Ingredients:

1 cup hung plain home made curd/ yoghurt

1 cup paneer, finely grated

Handful dhania( coriander) leaves, chopped fine

1-2 green chillies, chopped fine

Salt to taste

Just mix all the ingredients together and chill before serving with batons of crisp radish, daikon, carrots, baby corn, tomatoes, halved cherry tomatoes, lightly steamed broccoli and green peppers, raw yellow, orange and red bellpeppers and spring onions or leeks. Dad had also added lettuce as the base for the vegetables, marinated in apple-vinegar. Delicious!

Now that's a positively reeking-with-health type of last entry for the year. Just in time for me to go hog-wild partying tonight. See y'all next year!

Decadent Food

Lots of different types of food come to mind when one thinks of the word decadent - chocolates, caviar, wine, champagne - but I bet vegetables don't top the list. Especially a vegetable like the onion. An onion is spicy, flavourful, mild...but almost never an indulgence, right?

Until I came across this recipe for onion soup, that is.

Onions are one of my favourite vegetables, and I used to pine for them back at my parents' home when, during Dussehra, mom would cook without onions or garlic for ten whole days. The food was delicious as usual, but lost some of its savour. I discovered white onions a couple of years ago at the mandi and found them very interesting.

The soup recipe came out of one of my favourite cookbooks, titled simply Soups, Salads and Starters. It's technically meant to be made out of yellow onions but since I don't get that here, I make it with the white onions, and it is a joyous experience - like tasting creamy satin and velvet. Of course, while I say and mean decadence, my innate prudence ( and need to lose weight) make me pare down the amount of fat recommended in the original recipe - that calls for 115 gms of white butter - that's like a small pack of amul butter and more! I use a much smaller knob of butter and sometimes bung in a dab of clarified butter or ghee to add its nutty, sensual aroma. Someday I'm going to live dangerously and actually make it with the recommended amount of butter and see what the difference is...but not now!

Ingredients
1 kg white onions, finely chopped
Knob of butter (about 2 tbsp)
2 Bay leaves
2/3rd cup heavy cream
Salt and pepper to taste
1 litre water/ soup stock
Chopped chives to garnish
Dash lime juice

Put the butter in a heavy-bottomed sauce pan and melt. Add the bay leaves and the onions and stir until they are coated with the melted butter. Turn the heat down to low, cover and cook until the onions are soft but not mushy, and not browned.
Put aside 200 gms of the onions.
To the rest, add the soup stock and let come to a boil. Simmer for five more minutes and then set aside to cool. Take out the bay leaves and puree the soup until well blended.
Put back onto medium heat and add the rest of the cooked onions. Cook for a couple of minutes. Turn the heat low and add the cream. Let the soup heat up but not come to a boil.
Serve hot, garnished with chives, and topped with a spritz of lemon juice.

To go with this last night, we paired a green lettuce salad which was a tongue-tingling contrast - light, zingy and fresh.

I love salads in winter, when the veggies are fresh and crisp, and they form a part of our dinner most nights. We mixed lettuce - torn into bite sized ( and I mean bite sized - I don't like large leaves of lettuce that you have to struggle to put into your mouth) pieces, cherry tomatoes cut into halves, red and yellow bell pepper strips, diced radish, chopped spring onions with their stalks and walnuts broken into halves with a vinaigrette - made with walnut oil instead of oil.

I mixed about quarter cup of walnut oil with a tsp of mustard, a dash of balsamic vinegar, 2 tsp of powdered sugar and some freshly crushed pepper.

The fresh crispness was a wonderful contrast to the silky smoothness of the onion soup - weekend meal heaven!

Summer Perfection

I've been doing my usual lunchtime thing of trawling food blogs, and I noticed several entries about heirloom tomatoes. Which brings me to a simple recipe for an amazing salad that I came up with this summer. We were on holiday in Greece, Santorini, to be exact, and staying in an apartment, planning to cook some of our own meals. Santorini is an island that formed from a volcano, and something about the volcanic soil is meant to produce special tomatoes. So we bought a bunch of Santorini tomatoes to go with our meals. One bite and we were hooked - these are the more intense, flavourful, sweet, fruity, tomato-ey tomatoes we'd ever tasted. We wanted a side dish to go with a simple meal of moong dal and rice, and this not only met the requirements but became a staple for the rest of the week.

Ingredients:
Plum tomatoes - count about 6 per head, sliced in half
3-4 cloves garlic
Really good extra virgin olive oil
Salt to taste
Basil if you want to be naffy

Put the cut tomatoes into a bowl. Pound the garlic into pulp and add to the bowl and toss. Leave for about half hour. Add salt just before serving, else the tomatoes go all watery, and toss to mix. Drizzle the olive oil generously over the top. If you really want to, tear the basil leaves roughly and scatter on top. ( coriander leaves would taste equally great!)

This tasted great with a relatively bland Indian meal, but would go well with a cheesy pasta (Alfredo?) too. The tomato juices at the bottom of the bowl are lovely for mopping up with a bit of crusty bread.

Cabbage Salad

I love salads of all kinds and am always on the lookout for new types of salads to try. Over the years, I've come to realise that what makes for a good salad is the way one puts it together. by that, I mean that a good salad has to have a judicious juxtaposition of contrasts and complements - something soft and mushy against something hard and crunchy, something bland against a touch of spice, something sweet against something tangy...

I was getting creative in the kitchen some time ago, and I came up with a really nice cabbage salad which tastes great and also looks good. Give it a try!

Ingredients:

1 green or purple cabbage - very!! finely chopped into 2 inch shreds

1/2 pineapple, diced - or you can drain canned pineapple and use that

100 gms cheddar or processed cheese - diced

1 each of red, yellow and green bell pepper, cut into 2 inch long, thin shreds

Thai hot and sweet sauce

1 garlic clove

1. Mash the garlic clove and put it at the bottom of the salad bowl


2. Add the other ingredients, except the sauce


3. Add the sauce last and then stir to mix. Adjust the level of sauce to your taste - more or less spicy

This salad goes well with a variety of food and tastes great on its own too! You can add roasted nuts to it to add crunch - pecan or pine nuts go well.

Asparagus surprise

I have a newfound love of asparagus, fostered by the lovely buffet menu at the Hilton in Gurgaon. They have a truly amazing salad spread and superb asparagus is almost always featured. I like to have it with a thai chilli sauce dressing and shavings of parmesan - the combination of flavours and textures is to die for.

Recently I found that the Spencer's hypermarket stocks asparagus and that has become my weekly indulgence. I had bought asparagus from the Malviya Nagar subzi mandi earlier but never quite known what to do with it since I don't like Hollandaise and feel that asparagus soup doesn't bring out the delicate flavour of the vegetable.

Last week when I bought over a pound of fresh asparagus, I was once again at a loss for what to do and decided to consult one of my favourite cookbooks - World Vegetarian by Madhur Jaffrey. Her descriptions of the settings and the recipes are glorious and guaranteed to immediately motivate you to start cooking. I tried out one of her recipes for asparagus, with some of my tweaks, and lo and behold - it's become a household favourite, not just for me, but my husband and 4 year old son. It's simple, fast and delicious:

Asparagus with soy dressing:

1 or 2 pounds Asparagus
Pinch of sugar
Pinch of salt
1-2 green chillies (depending on your palate and the fieriness of the chillies)
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 onion, finely chopped
3 tablespoons water
1 tsp soy sauce
Juice of half lemon
2 tbsp Olive oil
2 tbsp sesame oil
handful of pine nuts or small skinned almonds (you can substitute with hazelnuts or macadamia if you like)

1. Chop off the woody stems and cut the asparagus into thirds. Soak in water for 15 mts or so while you're preparing the other ingredients.
2. Pour in a glug of olive oil (I use plain olive oil for cooking and extra virgin for salads, but please yourself) into a wok and heat on a medium flame. Put in the nuts and stir for a couple of minutes till they get somewhat browned and crisp. Take the nuts out and spread on a napkin to cool.
3. Now add the onion, garlic and chillies to the oil and cook for a minute or two.
4. Then drain the asparagus well and add to the wok and stir till all the vegetables are well mixed.
5. Add the water (use your judgement about the amount of water needed), salt and sugar and bring to a simmer. Cover the wok at this point and let cook for a few minutes until the asparagus is tender.
6. Uncover the wok, add the soy sauce and lemon juice and mix well. Let most of the water boil away and then add the sesame oil.
7. Check the seasoning to make sure the flavours are balanced - hot, sweet, salty.
8. Mix in the roasted nuts and serve immediately. If you feel like it, you could also add some roasted sesame seeds just before bringing it to the table.