Peppered Pineapple & Cucumber Salad

This is a quick simple salad for those of you with a sweet tooth. Choose a nice ripe pineapple. Look for one that is yellower on the outside and smells fragrant. If it’s still quite green it will be tart and can burn your mouth. Unfortunately most fruit we buy from the supermarket is picked before is has fully ripened to extend the shelf life. However, you can sit your pineapple on the shelf for a few days to ripen if there are no ripe ones available. Eating fully ripened fruit is important. The fruit has properly developed and has just the right amount of enzymes to help you to digest it properly.

 

Peppered Pineapple & Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

1 Pineapple

1 Telegraph Cucumber

About 2 Handfuls of Spinach

About 1/2 Handful of Fresh Mint

Juice of 1 Lime

Cracked Black Pepper

 

Assembly

Slice the skin off the pineapple, quarter and core. Dice into small chunks and place in a mixing bowl.

Quarter the cucumber lengthways and dice into small chunks. Add to the pineapple.

Roll the spinach and slice finely to create thin ribbons and add to the bowl.

Chop the mint very finely and add to the bowl.

Finally add the lime juice and a generous amount of cracked black pepper and mix well.

The Lunch Bunch: Asparagus Nori Rolls

This was part of my delicious lunch today. I keep a packet of nori sheets in the cupboard at work so I can stuff them with whatever greens and veges I bring with me or grab from the supermarket. Sprouts make a great stuffing for nori rolls as they are nice and compact allowing you to roll it up nicely. Almost any vegetable works in a nori roll,  zucchini or cucumber, grated carrot, tomatoes, olives, herbs, the combinations are endless. Asparagus is right in season now and it’s the perfect shape for a nori roll.

Asparagus Nori Rolls

Ingredients

Untoasted Nori
Lettuce
Alfalfa Sprouts
Asparagus
Avocado
Lemon Juice
Tamari

Assembly

Lay your nori sheet flat on a board or a bamboo sushi mat and cover with the lettuce leaves first to prevent the nori getting soggy. Leave about 2cm clear on one side.

Then add your remaining fillings lengthways along the centre of the lettuce.

Squeeze a few drops of lemon juice on the fillings and on the clear edge to help it all stick together once you have rolled it up. You could also use water for this.

Now using your sushi mat or just your hands roll up from the opposite side the the clear edge. Press the roll tightly in on itself as you roll it up.

Cut in thirds or in half and use a little tamari & lemon juice as a dipping sauce if you wish. It also tastes great without it.

The Lunch Bunch: Red Cabbage Tacos

Red cabbage is one of my favourite leaves to use as a wrap. It looks amazing, it’s crunchy and you can fit a lot into one leaf. It’s really one of the things we raw foodies use as a bread substitute. The ingredients below are pretty much what I had in the fridge today. You could just as easily use things like cucumbers, tomatoes, sprouts or leftover salad. Whatever takes your fancy.

Red Cabbage Tacos

Makes 5

 

Ingredients

5 smallish red cabbage leaves

2 medium sized carrots

1/4 avocado

1-2 tsp lemon juice

about 8 stalks of fresh chives

Greens of your choice  (I used a mix of spinach, chard and lettuces)

Dulse flakes (Karengo Seaweed) for saltiness

 

Preparation

Finely grate the carrot. If you have a fine grater like one usually used for parmesean you will get more juicy flavour from the carrot.

Mash in the avocado, lemon juice and finely chopped chives. Add a little himalayan or sea salt if you wish.

Take a red cabbage leaf and fill with a few green leaves of your choice and top with some of the carrot avocado mixture.

Top with some dulse (karengo) and a few chopped chives.

 

The Lunch Bunch: Salad Flax Wraps

A few people have asked me to post the types of things that I take for lunch. I am fortunate enough to work in an office with a modest kitchen, so I can quite easily assemble salads and things with produce I keep in the work fridge or that I grab from the supermarket over the road. I’m not really into eating a lot of  fats anymore, I’m close to 80/10/10 but I’m not strict about it, I just try to keep it low-fat with lots of fruits and vegetables. So with these wraps I try to keep the amounts of flax seeds quite low and bulk them up with celery and psyllium instead. The amounts are very approximate so use what you have on hand and they’ll probably still turn out fine. I’ll write it down properly with the next batch.

Salad Flax Wraps

Flax Wraps

1 large zucchini

3 large stalks of celery

1 Red Pepper/Capsicum

1/2 cup ground flax seeds

1-2 tsp psyllium husk powder

About 3 cups of water

Blend everything in a high speed blender until smooth. You may want to add the water gradually. The psyllium and flax will absorb the water and make a thick gel like mixture, so you can always add more water if you think it is too thick.

Spread the mixture out into circles about 3-4mm thick on dehydrator mats. Make sure not to have any spots that are too thin.

Dehydrate for about 4 hours. Check as you go that they are not getting too dry. They should still be pliable.

Flip them over and dehydrate another 2-4 hours.

Store in a ziplock bag or container.

Tip: If you over dehydrate and end up with large thin crackers instead, you can take a spray bottle filled with water and finely mist them. Lay them between damp paper or tea towels and they will become bendy again.

Fillings

You can pretty much use anything you would normally have in a salad sandwich. For these I had lettuce, cucumber, tomato and grated carrot with a squeeze of lemon juice and a wee bit of sea salt. A small amount of avocado would go down well in the mix too. I find that grated veges are more juicy so I don’t have the need for a dressing or dip which keeps things nice and simple.