A wintry-looking lunch this week

Purple kale salad, squash/leek/corn/wild rice salad, and farro with lentils, caramelized onions and feta (I made mine with spelt and red onions). Looks very wintry – appropriate for the first week after daylight savings ends.

Kale, squash, leek and onions from Plan B. Feta from Ewenity and beluga lentils from Mountain Path both via Fiesta Farms.

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Another yummy lunch: kale, squash and chickpeas

I went to the Green Barn market on Saturday and stocked up on some deliciousness from Vicki’s Veggies, including bags of spinach, arugula and kale and a giant butternut squash. The squash was so big I used it for two squash salad recipes (both from Smitten Kitchen) that I’ve been enjoying for lunches all week: one with lentils and goat cheese (although I used a soft sheep’s cheese from Monforte) and one with chickpeas and a tahini dressing. It’s the latter that you see in the picture and that I’m eating for lunch today, alongside my standard kale salad.

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Squash and kale: An easy, healthy, work-friendly fall lunch

Just started my lunch and snapped a photo to share. It’s a meal I’ve been enjoying all week and (with a bit of prep work) it’s super easy.

I got two acorn squash in my organics box last week so on Sunday, I cut them in half and roasted them in the oven until tender. I also washed, tore and spun dry a bunch of black kale to keep in the fridge all week. Kale keeps well without dressing – I will often just put the whole salad spinner in the fridge as I find greens keep well in it, but sometimes I’ll transfer to a reused plastic container that I’d bought greens in from the store. Also make sure you have on hand some goat cheese and some nuts or seeds to sprinkle – I used a blend of hemp and chia but I could see using squash/pumpkinseeds, pecans or walnuts as well.

The morning of (or the night before, which is less ideal), make your kale salad for that day. Put the leaves in a bowl and drizzle over it some oil (I used hemp), the juice of half a lemon and a bit of maple syrup or honey. Then massage the kale until the dressing coats it and it wilts a little bit. To measure, I stuff the kale leaves into the container I intend to use before I put them into the bowl. Then I know they’ll fit.

Bring to work your salad, half a squash (or more if you can store in a fridge at work during the week), the goat cheese and the seeds/nuts. Then, at lunchtime, just microwave or heat your squash for a minute or so, mash on some goat cheese and sprinkle with seeds, then serve with salad on the side.

This is a light lunch so I’ve been finishing with a dessert of yogurt. This week I’m eating maple sheep’s yogurt from Ewenity, but Greek yogurt is also a good choice as it’s high in protein so very filling.

Enjoy!

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Juice is hard to photograph

Excuse the terrible pictures, I’m going to have to come up with a nicer way to take photos of juice. But today’s my first day testing out the Breville Juice Fountain Plus, which the company kindly lent to me for a story for besthealthmag.ca.

My absolute favourite juice is kale-apple-ginger, so that was my first attempt, preceded only by kale-pear-ginger for the household member who’s allergic to fresh apples. As you’d expect, the pear version was quite thick, but delicious. I think I did four pears, four or five stalks of kale and a few inches of ginger.

The kale-apple-ginger was also good, and more liquid than the pear. I did about the same ratio and actually found it very sweet – I must have chosen a sweet variety of apple. (I picked a bag of local organics from the new organics case at Fiesta Farms.)

The juicer was super easy to use and easy to take apart to clean too – although like all juicers, cleaning it afterward is a bit of a pain. My only challenge was that there were a lot of chunks of kale leaves in the pulp container afterward, so it obviously wasn’t handling all the kale. I was alternating kale with apple like I’d read to do, but that didn’t seem to be enough. Does anyone have any tips for getting more green juice?

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Squash and kale

I’m always excited to get squash and kale in my organics box, as they go so well together. This weekend I made a Bon Appétit recipe for butternut squash and kale bread pudding – it’s always popular. I think I made it for the first time last year for Thanksgiving. And tonight I’m going to steam the rest of my squash (it was a big one) to make this butternut squash smoothie. (I might even add kale.)

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Raw vegan cabbage and kale slaw

I really enjoy Ani Phyo’s cookbooks – so much so that I just bought her most recent one, Ani’s Raw Food Essentials. While I haven’t tried any recipes from that one yet, I wanted to share the slaw that I’m addicted to, from her earlier book, Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen. I can’t say yet which book is my favourite, but if you’re at all interested in raw food, you should definitely pick up one of them.

The recipe calls for red cabbage, but I recently made it with green (that’s what comes in my box) and it was just as good. Garden-fresh kale is a lot more tender, but any will do. I’ve made the dressing with macadamia nuts instead of Brazil and it worked that way, too. You could probably also use cashews.

Don’t skip the wakame, it adds delicious crunch and flavour. But if you don’t like soggy seaweed, and plan to keep this in the fridge for a few days like I often do, don’t add the wakame until serving. I don’t often keep hemp oil in the house so I usually use olive oil.

Hempseeds at the store are expensive. I buy mine online.

Ani Phyo’s Wakame Hemp Power Slaw

1/2 head of green or red kale, ribs removed, and leaves torn into bite-sized pieces
1/4 head red or green cabbage, cored and thinly sliced
2 green onions, chopped
1/2 cup dry wakame
1/2 cup hempseeds

Dressing:
3/4 cup Brazil nuts
2 cloves garlic (I find this very garlicky, so if you’d prefer a milder taste, cut down to one)
1 tablespoon grated ginger (I use extra and just toss peeled chunks in the food processor)
1 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 cup hemp or olive oil
Juice of 1 lime, about 2 tablespoons
1/4 cup water

Mix kale, cabbage, green onions and wakame in a bowl. In a food processor, process nuts, garlic, ginger and salt until well mixed. Add remaining ingredients, and process until smooth. Toss with slaw.

Top with hempseeds to serve, or you can just mix them in with everything else.

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Fried chickpeas and kale

I had never thought of frying chickpeas until I came across this recipe for Pan-fried Chickpea Salad from blog 101 Cookbooks. I made it one night and was impressed with the tenderness frying gives canned chickpeas, and with the simple flavour of the curried yogurt dressing.

So tonight, I mixed up my own modified version of the recipe. I included shiitake mushrooms but I wouldn’t recommend it – they weren’t bad, but didn’t add anything.

You need:

1 red onion
1 14-oz can chickpeas (or equivalent from dried)
1 bunch kale
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1 Tbsp curry powder
salt and pepper to taste

Fry ingredients over medium-high heat, starting with the onions and chickpeas, then the kale. Add salt and pepper to taste while cooking. Meanwhile, mix yogurt with curry powder. When chickpea mixture is done, remove from heat, transfer to a bowl and blend with dressing. Serve warm or cold.

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Thanksgiving

My parents were in town for Thanksgiving last week, and together with my sister and her boyfriend the six of us put together a pretty fantastic Thanksgiving meal – although unfortunately I didn’t take pictures of everything. We enjoyed it so much (and had so many recipes we wanted to make but couldn’t) that we’re thinking of doing a second Thanksgiving next month.

I let a turkey in the house this year, ordered from Fiesta Farms – at $60 for 9 pounds, it seems expensive, but when you consider that it served dinner to five people, plus leftovers for many sandwiches, plus the makings of a few litres of turkey soup, I don’t think it costs much at all – per portion, certainly less than a turkey sandwich or soup at Tim Hortons. You may have been following the articles on thestar.com by Margaret Webb about the perils of organic turkey farming in Ontario – if not, here they are for your reading pleasure. Good luck to the farmers.

But it was the side dishes that really shone. To start with, we did our standard baked mashed yams (spiced with mace) topped with marshmallows. But this year, to make it more of a foodie affair, I made homemade marshmallows, which were divine and puffed up and melted far better than the bought ones. They’re actually quite easy, too, if you have a couple of mixers on hand. (I used my stand mixer for the main mixing and my handheld for the egg whites.) I got the recipe from Smitten Kitchen, of course, and here’s a close-up of the marshmallows post-baking.

We also did a couple of recipes from the November issue of Bon Appetit: a brussels sprout slaw with mustard dressing and maple-candied pecans that are to die for, and a beautiful butternut squash kale bread pudding from the kitchen of Orangette. (I’m not always the biggest fan of brussels sprouts, but the ones my sister picked up at St Lawrence Market were divine – both green and purple and full of flavour, and no bitterness.)

And here’s a close-up.

And for dessert, a butternut squash pie with a ginger cookie crust courtesy of Canadian Living. I used ShaSha cookies for the crust, and tripled the spices in the filling. This is the second time I’ve made this and I’ll make it again.

What did you make for Thanksgiving?

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