Super Salads

This salad pic has created quite a lot of interest as salads go. When people think of eating healthily or dieting salads are the first thing that pop into your mind but without some creativity can get all rather standard and miserable. Alternatively, they can require so many ingredients they hardly seem worth the trouble. These are pretty simple, varied enough to taste good without hours of chopping or prep. Eat with a slab of protein and get involved!

Salads are not a science so measurements are lax, and you can pretty much supplement every ingredient for something else… but here is the basic gist.

Quinoa and roasted red pepper salad

Ingredients:

• 1 cup quinoa
• 2 red peppers
• radish (sliced thinly)
• 3 spring onions (Sliced as thin as possible)
• parsley
• coriander
• toasted pine nuts

Dressing:

• 1tbsp sesame oil
• 2 tbsp mirin
• juice of half a lemon
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• A squeeze of agave or honey
• tsp mustard (dijon or wholegrain or whatever you have in)
• pepper juice

Something quite wonderful happens to peppers when you shove them in a very hot grill on for about half an hour (turning a couple of times to make sure all is even and good in the world).

Once the peppers are black all over, take out the oven, leave to cool and pull off the charred skin. What you are left with is a very sweet, soft pepper flesh which is delicious with quinoa, buckwheat or any other healthy grain. When you’re slicing it make sure you scrape away pepper seeds but keep hold of the pepper juice that it makes and add it to your dressing.

Mix everything together. Pour the dressing on fairly last minute so that the radishes stay nice and crunchy – they add important texture to the salad. Taste and make sure seasoned well (the soy in the dressing may not be enough so add salt).

Roasted veg and tahini dressing

This salad works well with quite a wide range of vegetables. Done it before with squash and beetroot and have thrown in broccoli and red pepper when it’s lying around, so think of this recipe as a guide which you can adapt according to taste and what you need to use up in your fridge

Ingredients:

• 2x cauliflower head
• 2 x aubergine
• 2 x red onion
• 1 tbsp. ground coriander
• 1 tbsp. ground cumin
• Roughly chopped parsley and/or coriander
• Toasted chopped nut of choice – I usually use almonds, pine nuts or hazelnuts.

Dressing:

• Tahini paste
• Lemon juice
• Water
• Salt & pepper

Cut veg into relatively equal size so they cook evenly. spray oil. evenly coat with spices and season. roast for about half an hour, check on them halfway through and spoon around if some bits are going brown.

Cool, scatter herbs and pour over the dressing. Chuck on the nuts and job done.

Green salad

A green salad is a green salad is a green salad. Except when its slightly better than your average green salad which this one is!

Mix up your leaves – this one is baby gem (cut lengthways) Chicory and a dolce Verde Romain lettuce (which is my current lettuce squeeze!). Variety is important to get a good sweet (Romain, gem, iceberg) and bitter (watercress, rocket, chicory) mix and different textures.

Add a large ripe avocado, pumpkin seeds and cress.

Cress is massively underused, it is super cheap, tasty and can massively elevate salads so get some in, or hanker back to school days and grow your own.

To keep in the realms of super-duper healthy, dress with lemon juice (just before serving) and season. Or make a simple lemon vinaigrette with extra virgin love oil, white wine vinegar, whole grain mustard and a lot of lemon juice.