Salad as an art form

For my first six months or so of this ETL life, I diligently perused bookstores, libraries, and amazon for raw and/or vegan cookbooks. I had exhausted my own ability to be creative in the kitchen with different methods of preparing natural food without fat. It took me a while to realize that raw/vegan cookbooks use copious amounts of oil and nuts. I found myself modifying recipes at the same rate as I would in any traditional cookbook. Alas, I found a few gems and one of those is The Raw Gourmet. This book is half raw cookbook and half instruction manual on how to sprout seeds and soak nuts. It has some recipes without oil (all my cookbooks must meet this criteria to be placed on My ETL Test Kitchen shelf), and great advice on using sprouts in everyday cooking. It also contains one of my very favorite quotes that I recite to myself almost daily:

"Think of salad making as an art. Seek to obtain the highest possible nutritional value from your salads while making them a feast for the eyes as well as the palate."

Love that! It's so true, too! Salads are so gorgeous with their vibrant colors, their multiple textures, and most importantly, their great tasting, highly nutritional ingredients. Making and eating an amazing salad has become an art form for me. I'm inspired by what is fresh at the market, I plan my ingredients according to taste and texture and then I create art in a bowl. Eat To Live is so rewarding on so many levels in my life. I can only hope to inspire others on their journey towards optimum health and happiness.

Simply fill a large bowl with what inspires you and toss it all up.

I like to pick out the greens to form a bed on the plate.

Top with all that yummy goodness and enjoy!

Zesty Tahini Dressing

So, Whole Foods makes some no-oil dressings under their Health Starts Here brand. Everything they make under that name is from their fresh kitchens. You'll only find it in the refrigerated produce section. I've counted maybe 7 in the last year. They are always changing, I guess depending on the demand at each location. It's mostly just by chance that you will find them. I wish they were more readily available, but it has happened to me before that I go looking for them and find none. I certainly don't want this to happen to you, but there you have it. When you find them, rejoice! :)

The only sure thing about today's salad is that it had to be cold, crunchy, and refreshing. It is hot and humid in DC today and I was really looking forward to lunch! I like to toss everything in a big bowl first and then pick out the lettuce onto a plate and pile everything on top.

Salad: Earthbound Farms spring mix, steamed green beans, Zima sweet grape tomatoes, garbanzo beans and lentils.

Green Bean & Salsa Salad

I love, love, love salsa. Fresh, finely-diced is my favorite. It's also one of the top things I don't make myself. I just don't have the time for that much mincing of veggies. For this reason, it contains salt. Trust me, it's impossible to find salsa without salt. I've tried. A lot.

I made this up one day when I was out of lettuce AND had left-over steamed green beans. It is crazy good! I use a fork and knife to cut the green beans as I dig into the pile of salsa. I also add lemon juice to make everything swimmy.

French green beans, garbanzo beans, salsa: from the refrigerated produce section of most grocery stores. This one is from Trader Joe's.

Tenleytown Whole Foods Lunch

A pretty typical day in the life of baby and nanny involves a trip to Whole Foods. Today we spent the morning at the park playing in the sandbox and swinging before heading over to WF for lunch. Their raw food bar is my one-stop ETL shop. Selection varies from one WF to another. Some have a few prepared ETL salads which is always a nice surprise, but if not, I can always choose from the multitude of peeled, chopped, steamed and otherwise ready to eat veggies and fruit.

This is spinach, brussel sprouts, radishes, roasted corn, sweet peas, beets, and wheat berries. I added a no-oil creamy roasted pepper dressing available in the produce section.