Hayley: More Than Just a Salad

My favorite meals are made up of a vegetable base with some kind of protein (goat cheese, nuts, meat, beans, or seafood) on top, but I wouldn’t call them salads. “Salad”, for me, describes a raw vegetable creation, while I prefer the taste of cooked veggies.

For the creation above, I cooked kale, mushrooms, onions, and beets in coconut oil until they were tender. I added the kale at the very end so that it wouldn’t get too wilted, and I sliced the beets very thin to speed up their cooking time. For protein, I chose chickpeas and goat cheese– two all-time favorites. I also added a tiny drizzle of maple syrup, which tasted especially good with the beets. The flavors were sweet and earthy all at once. Dwight Schrute would have loved it.

Cold vegetable salads can be refreshing and delicious, but sometimes they just don’t have the depth of flavor that you get with warm, roasted vegetables. I would rather season a pan of vegetables with oil, salt, pepper, herbs, garlic, or other spices and make the veggies themselves become flavorful instead of pouring tons of salad dressing over raw vegetables and getting flavor that way.

Last week Rebecca came home from work holding this:

I love cooking vegetables, but Squashy is still sitting on our kitchen counter because both of us are too intimidated to touch it. We might need a bigger oven and a sharper knife.