Saturday - new salads

We experimented with two new salads today; and tried some variations on some of our tried and true ones. One of our favourites is the Sweet Potato Black Bean - however, I wanted to try it today with a change in the vinaigrette. So we tried it, and it's definitely a keeper. We changed the 1/4 cup lime juice to 1/4 cup concentrated orange juice, and omited the sugar. Mmm good!

The two new salads we tried were a parsnip salad and a buckwheat salad. Company's Coming has a parsnip salad in their salads book, and we tried it before and didn't really like it, so we made up our own. Because we had already opened a can of frozen orange juice we used it in the vinaigrette, but we wanted it to be a lighter colour to complement the parsnips, so we used rice wine vinegar.

Parsnip Salad – makes 8 cups

6 parsnips, grated

½ turnip grated

½ cup grated carrot

3-4 chopped green onions

½ cup chopped celery

¼ cup chopped parsley

½ chopped red pepper

½ cup raisins

Vinaigrette

½ cup oil

¼ cup lemon juice

½ cup concentrated orange juice

2 tsp chopped garlic

¼ cup rice wine vinegar

1 tsp salt

We also tried a buckwheat salad, that had possibilities but we decided that the buckwheat is too strong for a salad. If we make it again we're going to try it with millet instead. So here it is:

Millet Rice Salad – makes 4 cups

1 cup brown rice

¼ cup wild rice

1 cup millet

Cook grains. Cool. Add

¼ cup dried cranberries

¼ cup raw pecans

1 small bunch fresh parsley, chopped

3 radishes, thinly sliced

2 green onions, chopped

Vinaigrette

2 TLB oil

1 TLB lemon juice

1 TLB soya sauce

2 TLB concentrated orange juice

They had a lot of tomatoes half price at the store today, so we ended up making a Greek Salad with chopped tomatoes instead of cherry tomatoes. Cleaning out the fridge I discovered several cucumbers and a big bag of sugar snap peas so we also made a Marinated Asian Vegetable. We added the cucumbers to it even though the recipe didn't call for it, and used sugar snap peas instead of edamame. They look so pretty that even though I never put pictures on my blog, I have to today.