All About Salads!

Today I had two goals, to make my lunch for the week and to be able to calculate the nutrition on my meal.  Now that Fallon has gone back to New York, I don’t have to worry about cooking with gluten accidentally contaminating her food, I finally gave into a craving and the results are as follows.  I decided to go with two different salads for this week, and I picked up some greens to serve them over.  I have to admit, both of these recipes have been inspired by food I have seen or tasted recently.

Whole Grain Salad

This is partially inspired by a quinoa dish I had at a favorite Asian restaurant of mine and the aforementioned salad.  I cooked Bulgur, Quinoa, and Barley.  The barley by far took the longest to cook.  In cooking these, I just followed the directions on the packaging.

I then diced the rest of the ingredients into bite size pieces: mango, tomatoes (removed the seeds), sugar snap peas, zucchini, summer squash, asparagus, and lime juice.  For a salad, I like having everything bite size.  A trick to the asparagus is to remove the fiberous ends as they really are too tough to eat.  I bend one asparagus until it breaks, and I use it as a guide to know where to cut the ends off the remaining asparagus.

As I cooked each grain, I tossed the zucchini, squash, and asparagus with the grains while they were warm.  Ric and I love our veggies to have a crunch, but I didn’t want these to be completely raw.  I found the residual heat from the grains gave us the perfect result.  I also sprinkled a little lime juice on the hot grains so they would absorb it.

Once I had finished cooking all of the grains and my mixture had cooled, I stirred in the rest of my fruit and veggies.  The most time consuming part of this dish was waiting for the different grains to cook.  Then it was simply combine and stir!  I love easy dishes!  This recipe was HUGE.  When I made it, it made 13 cups.  I’m counting a cup as a serving which has 136 calories and 1g of fat!

 Green Chicken Salad

 

A friend of mine at work made this salad and I couldn’t help myself.  I of course made a few tweaks to this, but the foundation is the same: making a mayo free, yet incredibly creamy, chicken salad.  The key to this recipe’s success is the avocado.  But we will get to that in a minute.

Today the chicken thighs were on sale again, so I went with chicken thighs.  If you prefer white meat, then the nutrition information will be a little lower than mine, but even with the dark meat, I’m pretty happy with the result.  I made a quick spice rub and roasted my chicken thighs in the oven at 350 until they were cooked through.  At the very least I would salt and pepper both sides of your chicken.  It really makes a difference in the flavor of the chicken. 

My husband is all about no waste.  So I have a few tricks with the chicken that never fail to impress him.  After the chicken was fully cooked, I pulled it out and let it rest until it was cool enough to handle.  Then I pulled off the skins and deboned the chicken.  I froze the skin and bones and will use them when I’ve collected enough to make a yummy chicken broth.  I will use raw, rotisserie, or roasted skin and bones.  I don’t like the result from chicken that has been smoked or on a grill.  I also reserved the rendered chicken fat.  I don’t use this in my everyday cooking, but I do have a few recipes I’ll share in the future, for special occasions, that using the chicken fat really makes a huge difference.  I also save the ends of the asparagus in the freezer.  These are too fiborous to include in the salad, but they are really yummy in a future broth or soup. 

While waiting on the chicken I chopped the red onions.  I like them pretty fine for this dish, I then let them sit in ¼ cup Champaign vinegar while I chopped the other veggies.  I love what the vinegar does to the onions, but I didn’t want it to be in my salad, so I strained the onions after about 20 minutes and before I added anything else to it. 

To the pickled red onions I added the cilantro, green onions, lime juice and avocado.  I used a potato masher to combine.  I wanted most of the avocado to make a creamy sauce, but I tried to leave a few little avocado chunks.  What is really awesome about this mixture is how creamy yet refreshing it is.  The lime juice really played off the fatty avocado and the cilantro just brightened it up.

As if this all wasn’t enough, I decided I wanted a crunch in my salad and had my heart set on jicama.  I have been pretty intimidated by the jicama in the past, but I tried it at work in a salad and decided that it was worth conquering my fear.  I cut the jicama and chicken to about the same size pieces and combined everything together. 

Now this recipe made 7 ½ cups of salad.  Each cup only has 228 calories!  This is one of those recipes that has helped my dear husband to eat his words on an ingredient that he told me he didn’t like.  When we met, he said that he hated avocado because vegetables and fruit need to have texture.  In this salad, the crunch from the jicama gave him the crunch he was looking for, and he LOVED it!

 My plan for this week is to serve a cup of each salad on a bed of baby greens.  I hadn’t seen these before, so I figured I’d give them a try.  The total calories for this entire meal is 370.4 with 14g of fat (only 1.9 of which are saturated) and 11g of fiber!  

I was so proud of myself for keeping up with exactly what I was putting into each of these dishes, that I decided to take it one step further.  The total food cost of this meal is $3.27!  Not too shabby for a healthy power lunch that I have no doubt will keep me satisfied!