the cooked and the raw

Although it’s been raining for days and days, I really feel it’s time to introduce some summer fruit and vegetables into my diet. The other day I bought some very summery ‘vegetable creatures’: strawberries and cucumbers. I’ve always loved both, but never thought about having them together as main ingredients in a salad. I got the idea from a book on vegetarian Indian cuisine (Yamuna Devi’s The Best of Lord Krishna’s Cuisine), and slightly changed the recipe. This sweet-savoury salad is indeed very light and refreshing, and works perfectly as a salad, on its own, or as an easy fruit salad to finish a meal. I think I’ll make it more often as soon as the weather gets warmer. A great thing about it, is that you can make it sweeter or more savoury by varying the amounts of salt and rice malt syrup ;) For best results, choose organic fruit and vegetables. 

Makes 2 servings.

Ingredients:

For the salad

1 basket fresh strawberries

1 medium-sized cucumber

For the dressing

1 cup freshly squeezed orange juice

1 tablespoon fresh mint, minced

whole sea salt (to taste)

rice malt syrup (2 to 4 teaspoons, depending on taste)

powdered dried ginger (to taste)

Salad

Wash the stawberries, drain them and remove the caps, then cut them into halves or quarters. Wash the cucumber and cut it into slices or smaller bite-sized pieces. Set aside and prepare the dressing.  

Dressing

In a medium bowl, whisk the orange juice, rice malt syrup, salt and ginger together, then add the mint and stir.

To assemble

Add the strawberries and cucumber to the dressing bowl, toss and serve. Alternatively, you can serve the salad directly into individual small bowls.

If you have to convince someone that tofu is a tasty alternative to meat and animal proteins, try with scrambled tofu. Scrambled tofu allows you to be very creative: it can be paired with almost any kind of vegetable, from zucchini to carrots, from seaweeds to peppers (just to list a few…). It’s also great with nuts. I think that firm or extra firm tofu work best for this kind of recipe but this is just my personal suggestion as I know that some people prefer the softer version. I’m very ashamed to confess that for this scrambled tofu I used frozen spinach…which is not good at all …but it happened! The tofu and the lemon, of course, were organic ;)

Ingredients (makes 2 abundant servings):  

250 g firm, organic tofu

1 ½ cups cooked spinach

½ red onion, chopped

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon rice malt syrup

1 tablespoon shoyu

2 tablespoons raisins

2 tablespoons pine nuts, toasted 

zest of 1 organic lemon, grated

whole sea salt (to taste)

chili powder (to taste)

Blanch the tofu by placing it in a pan of boiling water. Simmer for 2 minutes, remove the tofu from the boiling water and rinse it under cold water. Set aside. 

It’s always a good idea to blanch tofu before sautéing it or baking it or using it for dips. The blanching procedure, which is very easy and takes only a few minutes, makes tofu more absorbent of flavours and its soy protein a lot more digestible.

In a wok, heat the olive oil and sauté the onion until it’s tender, then add the shoyu and the rice malt syrup. Keep cooking over medium heat for 1 more minute. If you are using frozen spinach you can throw it into the wok once you have cooked it separately in a pan of boiling water (and drained them well) and sautè for a couple of minutes. If you choose fresh spinach you’ll have to figure out the amounts (as you’re going to need more than 1 ½ cups) and stir fry the spinach in the wok until wilted. Crumble the tofu using your hands and add it to the vegetables. Cook for 3 to 5 minutes, then add the pine nuts, raisins, chili, lemon zest and a pinch of salt. Taste and adjust seasoning with additional salt and chili if necessary, stir and serve.