Salad and Croutons

My name is Bethany, and I'm a vegan. I've been a vegan for 35 years now, as of 2010, and a vegetarian for a couple of years before that. You've never heard of me because I keep a low profile — but all that is going to change, starting with this new blog. (Ha, ha! 14 years later, my anonymity is going strong.) 

 

I've decided to answer the question "What DO you eat?" This is asked of many vegans when they state they don't use animal products. The short answer is: anything in the vegetable (and mineral) kingdom, within edible reason.  

 

But this blog is going to be more like the long answer. I will try to add to it from time to time, if I make something for the family that seems to be popular, or if I enjoy eating it myself.  I'm sure I'll add a lot of extraneous information along the way, so please bear with me. As many organically grown ingredients as possible will be used, so I will say that up front, rather than writing Organic, Organic, over and over. Read on for a meal of SALAD and CROUTONS.

Every late winter I begin to crave SALADS. This is what I made last night:

Ingredients

1 — head of organic lettuce, washed and torn into pieces

2 cups — mixed organic salad greens, including arugula or a spring mix

1 — carrot, grated

1/2 — golden or red beet, grated (or red cabbage, grated)

1 thumb — grated fresh ginger (optional) (in fact, all these ingredients are optional)

1/4 cup — raisins or dried cranberries

1 — avocado, chopped

Sprinkles — olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and any other seasoning you like

Method

In a large bowl in the sink, I submerged a red leaf lettuce. I shook it off and tore it into pieces in a large salad bowl.

I threw a bag of baby mixed salad greens into the same water, shook it off and added it to the lettuce. It was already looking pretty colorful.

I washed off and grated a carrot and part of a golden beet right onto the salad greens. Sometimes I use a red beet, and sometimes red cabbage. Sometimes I grate some fresh gingeroot on to it. Last night I didn't.

I threw on some raisins.

I chopped up an avocado and added it in.

I sprinkled olive oil and balsamic vinegar all over it, and added a sprinkle of seasoning — this one happened to be Trader Joe's 21 gun salute, I think it's called. No, now I realize it is 21 Seasoning Salute, which makes more sense.

I mixed it all together and seasoned it a little more.

I like to have this salad as a bed for the rest of my dinner, but you could eat it alone, in its own bowl, or on the side, if you'd like.  It is easy to prepare if you make sure to keep some of the lettuces purchased every few days.  I like to make enough so I can have leftovers for lunch the next day, with some of Soyboy's Tofu Lin chopped up in there, and maybe some croutons.

Which reminds me: CROUTONS are very easy to make, and it turns out they are good enough to snack on too.

Ingredients

1 — loaf of stale but not too stale bread, cubed

1/4 cup — olive oil mixed in to make the seasonings stick

1/4 cup — nutritional yeast

1 tsp — garlic powder, onion powder, oregano

1/2 tsp — dried basil, dried parsley, 21 Seasoning Salute

1/4 tsp — salt (optional)

 

Method

Preheat the oven to 350F degrees.

Cut up a stiff loaf of whole grain bread (could be rice bread, if you're gluten-free, in which case probably you don't need to toast it quite as long) into half-inch slices, then rods, and finally cubes. Imagine you are making Cuisenaire blocks.

 

Place them in a large bowl and sprinkle them with olive oil, stirring it all around. 

Sprinkle the cubes with: garlic powder, onion powder, nutritional yeast flakes (available in health food stores, and kind of cheesy tasting), oregano, basil, parsley, and some more of that seasoned salt or herb mix mentioned above. Add a sprinkle of salt if necessary, and enough olive oil to make it just tasty enough and make the seasonings stick — do not saturate the cubes.

Spread the cubes out on a cookie sheet and stick them in the oven, stirring them every now and then, until they smell kind of toasty.  It might be about half an hour, at the most.  They might not seem hard yet, but they will harden as they dry.

If you want them really crunchy all the way through, make your cubes smaller and bake them longer or, if you want them a little chewy inside, make them bigger.

Let them cool, and keep in a tight container for a few days if you can stop yourself from eating them. It is better to add them to your salad right when you're about to eat it, or they'll get soggy. They are also very good on top of soups!

Okay, that's it for my first post, but that should tide you over for now and make for a healthy addition to your diet.