Rainbow Asian Salad
The holy grail of salads has arrived. This, my friends, is the gateway salad that will suck you in and make you truly believe that salad is your friend. Well, it tastes good anyhoo...
NUTRITIONAL OVERVIEW
Eating a rainbow means you're taking in a broad range of essential nutrients, vitamins and minerals which in turn will help your body fight off infection, help boost your immune system and help balance your mood. Each colour vegetable is packed with different nutrients serving different functions from cancer fighting to glowing skin. There are five colour categories: red, purple/blue, orange/yellow, green, white/brown. The colours are a result of unique disease fighting chemicals called phytochemicals.
Recipe
RAINBOW ASIAN SALAD
SERVES: 2-4 MEAL DEPENDING (SIDE OR MAIN?)
PREP TIME 20 MINS | TOTAL TIME 20 MINS
This is my pride and joy, my signiture dish. My all time favourite salad and has never failed me. You can spiralise and make this dish beautiful BUT you can clumsily hack away at this and it will still not disappoint you. Try not to skip the purple cabbage, carrots, onion or coriander if you don't have to as these are the soul of the dish.
INGREDIENTS
1/2 purple cabbage
3 carrots
3 cucumbers
1 orange pepper
1 red chilli pepper (optional)
1/2 red onion
2 spring onions
1 lemon (juiced)
handful mint
handful coriander
vermicelli noodles (as many/few as you like. I prefer my salad to have more salad than noodles but it changes from day to day)
2 handfuls of nuts (peanuts, cashews, sliced almonds, sesame seeds...)
Please play around with the ingredients. The above is a list of colourful veggies that we like and had in our house on the day but can be done with any veggies you have on hand really. Adjust onion and chili according your tastes, we LOVE onions here in the Afifi clan.
METHOD
1. Slice the red onion in to thin half moons and throw in to the salad bowl, add the lemon juice as this will sweeten the onions while you chop.
2. slice and/or spiralise the rest of the veg.
3. Once you've added all your veggies to the bowl bring water to a boil and add to the vermicelli noodles. follow pack instructions but usually you cover the noodles with the water and cover the pot leaving the noodles to sit in the hot water for 5 minutes. You don't want to over cook them as they'll go mushy so just check on them at 5 mins, if they're edible drain then rinse under cold water until they've cooled down (or you can plunge in to a bowl of ice water). Squeeze the excess water out and transfer into salad bowl (I trim the noodles at this point to make eating a bit easier!)
4. Chop your herbs and throw them in too.
5. If you're adding nuts then toast them in a dry frying pan until... toasty? I used sliced almonds today but love love love peanuts and cashews in this dish!
6. Now add the Asian Tahini dressing (liberally), mix, serve in a great big heap and add your toasted nuts. Sit back and demand someone else takes care of the cleaning up bit.
