Raw Bento

My regular readers would know I was never a natural salad lover so when I went raw, I preferred raw soups, which are really blended salads, much more than the actual thing. I think munching on your food is an important part of feeling satiated so I tried to learn how to make good, tasty salads.

I thought about why I hated salads: to me, they were cold, tasteless, restrictive, visually unappealing, and lacked variety. Then I was like, if I turned all these things around, maybe I could make salads I actually like. So now I always make sure I leave my salads out in room temperature for 10 – 15 minutes before I tuck in and fill them up with yummy vegetables with a rockin’ dressing.

While taste is important, texture is also key to a delicious salad, so I love me some shredded veggies and/or sprouts in my bowl of goodies.

This is what I upgraded to just recently — a dreamboat of a vegetable julienne slicer. It is sooooo fast and sharp. Lesson learned: stick with the traditional.

Before, I had a Franc Franc “multi-purpose” food preparation thing (it was so multi-purpose, I can’t pinpoint what it really was frankly) that could dice and slice vegetables in any way you want. The problem was that the blades were not sharp enough and the cheap plastic container it had was not ergonomical in slicing veggies — I had to use a lot of strength to hold down the plastic container that was compounded with useless blunt blades. Sometimes my carrots would only come out sliced with lines pressed into them and I had to shred them manually. Those days are over. Gosh, good kitchen equipment is so important.

Check out my salads…

Colourful salad #1 with my own version of accidental raw nacho cheese sauce. I don’t know why this dressing turned out so orange because sometimes it comes out paler than this.

Recipe (in a high-speed blender):
1 cup cashews, soaked
1/2 red bell pepper
1/3 cup nutritional yeast
1 green onion
1 clove garlic
1 tbs apple cider vinegar
Sea salt and black pepper to taste
1 cup water

The pumpkin seeds are actually Go Raw ones that are flavoured with Celtic sea salt.

The non-raw fiance thought this was cereal but I didn’t mind at all because I’m a pumpkin seed fiend. AND, sprinkling this on salads gives them more protein and yet another texture. I love chucking green peas into my salads too. In summer, corn makes an oft appearance in my salads, too. I always use colourful veggies in salads that are a main meal.

Colouful salad #2 has what I call a “four-taste” dressing which I learned very early on from Karen Knowler’s website. Basically it’s a dressing that has four different flavours that will excite your palate…

Recipe (in a high-speed blender):
3 dates, soaked for at least an hour
1 clove garlic
1 tbs apple cider vinegar
1 tsp sea salt
2 tbs olive oil
Splash of water (optional; I like this dressing to be a bit runny)

As you can see, there are four main flavours — dates (sweet), apple cider vinegar (sour), sea salt (salty), garlic (I was going to put “bitter” but it’s not…it’s pungent? I don’t know, but I think you get my drift on having variety). This is sort of like a Raw 101 recipe and I still love it till this day even though it’s so fuss-free.

The above lunch was accompanied by a carrot avocado bisque and kimchi.

This soup turned out way paler than the one I tried before but that was because I used one whole avocado and 1 cup of carrot juice, instead of half an avocado and 2 cups carrot juice. What can I say, when I’m hungry, things go awry in my kitchen!

But the main point of my post is that colour and texture are so important to think about when making an appealing meal. It doesn’t take much effort — just a shift in thinking. Hope you salad-haters out there will give salads a chance, ‘cos I did and I’m a changed woman.