Late Spring chopped salad

March 19, 2014 at 8:50 pm (My brain, Salads, unrated)

I made a spur-of-the-moment chopped salad (i.e., no greens) yesterday for breakfast, and it turned out delicious, so I’m going to try to write down what was in it.

• Two carrots, grated
• Half of a kohlrabi, peeled and then julienned (actually I used a spiral slicer)
• About half a jar of hearts of palm, sliced
• A handful of florets of raw cauliflower, which had been marinated in a very ginger-y, vinegary dressing overnight
• One stalk of celery, sliced
• A couple handfuls of chopped parsley

We dressed the salad with my homemade Annie’s tahini dressing. The salad was very tasty, but what I liked most about it were all the different textures. Everything except the parsley was crunchy, but each ingredient offered a distinct type of crunch.

In other news, I finished four weeks of my no-allergy diet (although I caved and added back in eggs and soy after about three weeks). I noticed absolutely no change in my allergy symptoms, so I’m going to be adding back in all the foods I cut out.  Living without potatoes and citrus and peanuts and chocolate and sugar and dairy and wheat and other gluten-containing grains was actually not that hard, but I did really miss my tofu and soymilk and soy sauce. Eating out was a bit more challenging than usual, but we managed to go out to an Indian restaurant (I got a curry made with ground cashews instead of dairy), a Greek restaurant (they gave me vegetables with skordalia and a fava-bean spread instead of the tsaziki), a Moroccan restaurant (I got a salad and a vegetable plate), and various other places (where I usually got a salad or a vegan vegetable soup or if I was lucky a lentil soup).

At home things were pretty easy. I ended up making a lot of bean dishes and vegetable dishes, including:

• Sauerkraut patties with pinto beans and veggies
• Lebanese lentils and rice with cinnamon and blackened onions
• Several different dals
• Thai winter-vegetable curry with cashews and bamboo (but no soy sauce or tofu)
• Escarole in beans with olives and tomato sauce
• Braised fennel (using olive oil and no dairy)
• Roasted curry apple squash (with oil instead of butter)
• Pan-roasted brussel sprouts
• Broccoli in ginger vinaigrette
• Lots of salads with homemade Annie’s dressing
• Curried cauliflower with peas (but no potatoes)
• Black beans with avocado and salsa and raw veggies
• Broccoli in a ginger vinaigrette
• Roasted sweet potato fries
• Napa cabbage with black pepper and garlic (but no soy sauce)
• A vegetable stir-fry (with no tofu or soysauce, using a thai red curry-sauce as the sauce)
• Microwave squashes with lots of cinnamon and coconut oil instead of butter
• Lots of olives, and nuts or nut butter every day, usually with a piece of fruit or two
• Dried fruit and/or “Lara”-style bars, either storebought or homemade, to satisfy my sweet tooth

I was kind of curious whether I would lose weight on this allergy-free diet. I wasn’t purposefully trying to restrict my intake at all, but I was unable to eat a lot of my usual foods, and I had much more limited choices at restaurants. After one month of eating whatever I wanted, including lots of nuts and olives, my weight … drumroll … stayed exactly the same. So I guess my body is very good at finding an equilibrium, regardless of how many food groups I cut out.