Thursday, October 06, 2005

Salad Days

While I was dyeing like a madwoman yesterday, trying to make up the time spent getting away from the mountains of work I should have been doing, Dave decided to clean out the refrigerator.
YES. Cleaning out the refrigerator is last on my list of things I wish to do, ever, and avoid it like the toilet cleaning. I am a lazy pig.
So every few minutes he wanders into the dye room with something indistinguishable and I allow him the privilege of scooping it out of its container and dumping it. Very soon we have a clean refrigerator with not much in it to eat. Since I have to go to the PO to ship orders I promise to grocery shop.
It is a bit depressing to think of how much food spoiled since last I cooked, but I determined that freshly bought and freshly eaten will be my new plan.
Like: Only buy what you will eat for the next two or three days. No more huge bags full of stuff that rots in the crisper drawer.
Now, lately, without going into detail, I have noted that I am in major need of more fiber in my diet. And Dave needs to eat vegetables and not his basic diet of taco chips with popcorn, nuts and beer. OK those are veggie based, but not the green stuff he needs for healthy whatever…
I had a nice chopped salad in mind so when I brought home the goodies I got out the Cuisinart (which to this day I still call the Robot-Coupe, the name of my first processor) and proceeded to process using the slicing disc.
One Courtland apple
One peeled cucumber
A half green pepper
A half head of cauliflower (crumbled like blue cheese, but crunchy)
Then I sliced up a small head of romaine and grabbed a handful of mesclun and tossed in some parmeggiano reggiano, almond slices and finished with key lime juice and Caesar dressing. It was a revelation. Everything tasted distinct, and wonderful on the tongue. Dave had no trouble shoveling in this type of salad and had two huge mounds.
Success! The apple added a nice surprise of sweetness and the cauliflower was innocuous yet provide texture. I will do this again today with some dried apricots and blue cheese and walnuts.

3 comments:

  1. Delish! Inspiring... and I am loving the apricot idea. I always find dried fruit especially effective in the "fiber" department.

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  2. Anonymous12:32 PM

    very green with envy over the red beemer. Nearly all my first life(see before child) I drove my bright red MGB. So happy. Had to sell it to add on a wing for the kid. Happily he turned out really well. So at this point in life(57)I spent all my money on what? not a car but a sewing machine that doesn't even do 50 in the slow lane. I'm trying to work off the pounds of lobster so the salad looks like a great idea.Many salads for many days, months...possibly years. Maine was great.

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  3. Hi Melody :-) I had the same issue with the rotting food thing for years, mainly because we'd buy the same veges every week with a vague notion of what we'd cook. The result would often be three yellow heads of broccoli, 5 capsicums in various states and a few squishy cucumbers lolling in the crisper. So I decided to put together a menu every week, I hate doing it, and even worse, I hate making the shopping list. But it does ensure we eat a nicely varied diet AND we only buy things we are going to use so it saves us money in the end. This, and the washing up is my contribution to the food thing in our house, my partner does most of the shopping and all the cooking, which suits me fine :-)

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