Salad

You don't make friends with salad. Generally a bad idea for something you are about to eat. If you make friends by accident, just close your eyes and power through. Eat that salad like a man. Ha! Dollars to bagels, that phrase has never been uttered before.

Salads are easy. Fresh greens topped with fresh vegetables, maybe some fruit or nuts or seeds or cheese, and a dressing. Basically, salad is a pile of whatever fresh, ripe food you have in the house. I like my food in piles.

I started with some arugula and spinach. I added some red pepper sticks, cucumber quarter coins, and tomato wedges. I tossed this around a bit, taught it who's boss, and crumbled some feta over top. For the dressing I drizzled a splash of olive oil, another of balsamic and a sprinkling of tamari (soy) sauce. Five minutes work, nothing to it. If you can avoid cutting yourself and ignore the screams of the vegetables, you can make a tasty salad.

Salad. Hmmm, I'm still hungry....

Udon vegetable stir fry

Ingredients are to the left as well as a lime and sesame oil. You can barely see the ginger, and the bottles are soy and oyster sauce.

Saute in this order:
sesame oil with ginger
onions
carrot
thyme (stripped from the stem) & cauliflour
red pepper, garlic, lime & bok choi
add sauces
udon noodles, with more oyster sauce on them.

This turned out ok, but was missing something. I put a bit of hot sauce on it but it was still only ok. Maybe a sweet element would work, but I'm loathe to add sugar to anything. It's why my jams always fail to gel. I ate some leftovers for lunch but it still didn't really do it for me. The bok choi was chewy and hard to eat. I'd separate the leaves or cut them in halves or quarters next time. Maybe mustard would have pulled it all together? The vegetables were at a well cooked for my taste but the flavour wasn't there. Suggestions in the comments please.

*Update* I added a bit of orange zest and Arbol peppers to the leftovers. It was tastier than before and quite enjoyable. My beard liked it too, catching a rather large slice of carrot to save for later.

Spinach fettuccine vegetale

Spinach fettuccine with sauteed mushrooms, zucchini, red pepper, rapini, garlic and more spinach looks like this:

 And when covered in parmesan cheese, this:

Yummers!

Spaghetti squash vegetale

In an effort to make something besides pizza, I ventured into the realm of the healthy for something vegetarian.

1 spaghetti squash
olive oil
1 carrot, 6thed
some red pepper, finely diced
handful of spinach
small handful of walnuts, roughly chopped
fresh thyme
bit o butter
1/2 C fresh grated parmesan
salt and pepper to taste

Pre-heat oven to 400. Split squash in two, hollow out halves and discard seeds. Brush or spoon oil over cut side of squash, salt and pepper it to taste. Pile carrots under overturned halves to steam and roast with the squash until soft, about 40 minutes. Let cool a bit, then scrape out flesh with a fork to get lots of long squash strands. Chop carrots and add to squash with all the other ingredients and mix up. Stir in parmesan last and serve right away. Mine looked something like this:

The crunch of the walnuts and uncooked red peppers was very nice against the soft texture of the squash and other vegetables. Walnuts go really well with thyme. I think I roasted the squash too long or mixed it too much because the 'spaghetti' strands got kinda mushy. Never a good word when describing food.