Angel Salad

You probably get by now that I think all the things I make are tasty, at least the things I post or I wouldn't be sharing them but this one…  this one is really really lovely and special!

It's super light, and very simple but the combination of flavors are just delicious. Apricots, fennel, arugula, shallots, and pistachios with a drizzle of white balsamic vinegar. That's it.

It tastes very fancy, like something you would be served in only the finest of restaurants but it's got to be one of the simplest salads with few ingredients and not even a dressing to worry about.

The key is the apricots. I don't know if you have seen these before…

Angelcots or white apricots. They are delicious!!

I had never had them or even seen them but I stumbled across these at my local Trader Joe's. While I had planned to take more photos of them, once I sliced them open I found it hard not to just keep eating them. Luckily for this recipe, I was able to hold off enough to finish making the salad but barely!!!

They are a white flesh apricot that is super juicy like a nectarine, and sweet and buttery in texture. The outside is velvety like a regular apricot but the inside is melt in your mouth delicate.

They are a cross between a Morrocan and Iranian apricot and luckily for us, are grown here in the states in California, apparently on only 2 acres of land. Judging by the taste, I say we are going to need more land! They are rare and have a very short growing season but if you ever spy these, I highly recommend you snap them up. June seems to be the cut off. So hurry!

For this recipe, if you can no longer get these jewels, the regular apricots will work as well.

The Angel Salad

Adapted from a recipe by Jeanne Kelley for Bon Appetit. It says it serves 6-8 people - Ha!

Ingredients:

8 ounces of arugula leaves

1 Small fennel bulb, very thinly sliced (mandolin works great for this) 

2 Tablespoons of minced fennel fronds

6 Apricots, pitted and sliced thin

1 Shallot, sliced into thin rings and separated (while you have that mandolin out….)

1/4 cup shelled unsalted pistachios

2 Tablespoons white balsamic vinegar

Place the arugula and fennel in a big bowl.

Add in the shallots rings.

Drizzle with the balsamic vinegar and toss. Add in the apricots (sorry, no picture because I was distracted! ;-) or save and plate the greens and place the apricot slices decoratively on each plate.  

Top with the pistachios and any additional minced fronds for garnish and serve.

Just heavenly!

I hope you get a chance to try this with the Angelcots. It's definitely worth the extra effort looking for them. Hopefully if more people know about them, more stores will carry them and even more will grow them! One can hope.

I think I may just post this a bit early to get the word out and hopefully give some people time to get these apricots before the season is over.

I'll be sharing this over at Gluten-Free Cats' Raw Thursday as well as Healthy Vegan Fridays.

Just a note about my Instagram photos:  

Sometimes I post simple recipes over there, for instance smoothies or throw together meals in picture form along with snap shots of what I'm making or doing so if that sounds interesting to you, check me out there and follow along.
Here's the link.


Until next time, keep your food real and simple… it's just better that way.

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Summer's Stone Fruit Salad

I just love this time of year!

Besides the sight of watermelon back in the stores and better yet in my kitchen, I just love seeing the stone fruits roll in. And oh, the aroma! Apricots, plums, nectarines, peaches, plums, cherries, sigh….. Just mouthwatering! I could live on these things.

Stone fruit at the Santa Monica Farmer's Market
photo source: Forks Over Knives

So as I sat looking at the assortment on my counter today, deciding which to cut up and enjoy, I thought why should I have to choose? Let's make a big party for all of them. And then a few raspberries in the fridge felt a little left out so I added them as well.

Besides just cutting all the fruit up and placing them in a bowl, which would be delicious too, I decided to poke around the net and come up with an idea for how to add a dressing and some greens to wrap it all together. I'm really working hard at getting my 1lb of raw greens minimum in per day so a salad seemed a good idea.

And it was!

I stumbled across this recipe for Stone Fruit with Toasted Almonds on My Recipes, originally from Cooking Light and with a few tweaks thought I'd give it a go. This is a little different for me as it uses a sweet wine in the dressing but it's basically a reduction sauce so little if any alcohol is left. Paired with a splash of white balsamic vinegar, it makes for a nice light dressing that lets the fruit sing.

The key to this is to use an assortment of fresh and ripe stone fruit. Go ahead and use whatever you have on hand. Below is a list of what I had that was sweet and juicy and ready to go but cherries would be a nice addition as well.

Summer's Stone Fruit Salad

This is a very simple and elegant salad using wine and vinegar to cut the sweetness while at the same time dressing the greens. Below is what I used to make this recipe.

Ingredients:

1 cup riesling or other sweet wine
1 tablespoon white balsamic vinegar or other white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon almond oil, optional
3 plums
2 peaches
2 donut peaches
2 nectarines
3 apricots
8 cups of mixed baby greens
2 tablespoons of sliced almonds
1/2 cup fresh raspberries, optional

Start with placing the wine in a small sauce pan and heat on medium high heat until the liquid is reduced down to about 2 tablespoons.

While that is on the stove, approximately 10 minutes, start pitting and slicing the fruit over a bowl to catch any of the juices and place the sliced fruit in another bowl.

When the wine is reduced, add in the vinegar and oil if using and mix with the fruit juices.

To serve, toss the salad greens in a large bowl with the fruit, dressing and slivered almonds until well mixed. Plate and add raspberries if using.

This is as delicious as it is beautiful.

As I sit here looking at the apricots in the above photo, I can't help but remember a time from my childhood when I first discovered fresh apricots. One California summer, a patient of my dad's had invited our family to come to his ranch for a dinner. We drove for what seemed like forever and then up a hill that was covered with rows and rows of trees. We had never seen a ranch and the idea that the trees had food in it never even crossed our minds.  I must have been about 9 years old and my brother was probably 5 or 6. Once inside the house, we quickly became bored and I'm sure underfoot and were sent outside to play until the meal was ready.  I was an avid tree climber at that age but my little brother not so much. We wandered around the roads for a while but eventually I had to start climbing the trees. It didn't take long up in the trees to discover the ripe fruit and even though I had no idea what it was, I tested it out. Pretty courageous of me since I was a very finicky eater and had never eaten from a tree before. I shared the bounty with my brother and surprisingly he loved them just as much. In total gluttony, we picked and ate apricot after apricot as the sun went down.

Eventually it became dark and we were called in to the house to eat but of course we were already stuffed. I'm sure I swore my brother to secrecy about our smorgasbord but not doubt we were covered in apricot juice. When my brother got sick, the gig was finally up for sure and I was in trouble.  Little brothers. What can I say.

But that memory of sitting in a tree, high up on a hill over looking a valley as the sun went down eating juicy apricots on a warm summer night will always stay with me.

I hope you have some similar fond summer fruit memories.

Sharing:

I shared this recipe over at Allergy Free Wednesday's blog hop. I hope you check it out.

Until next time….

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Baby Ruby Salad with Blood Orange Cashew Dressing

A baby greens salad with blood orange sections, strawberries, dried apricots, pistachios in a blood orange cashew dressing.

This post is dedicated to my lovely niece, Claire who asked me the other day what to do with the baby kale she just bought. First of all let me just tell you how excited I am that she bought kale in the first place. She is a young mother with two precious little ones and she actually is making green smoothies for them now.... with kale! Woot Woot! and little  2 1/2 year old Victor is asking for "more." Love it!

See it's really adults that freak out over green looking drinks in the beginning, not the kids.

So this is a recipe I put together when I stumbled across a new looking container in our store:

Baby Kale Medley

I am really partial to tender baby greens, and this baby kale medley is no exception. It's not as hard core as the big leaf kale, in case you are new to the more powerhouse greens.  And also because it's a baby leaf, you don't have to worry about bitter stems, like the full leaves.

While you may not have a Sprouts/ Henry's Farmer's Market where you live, I think baby kale is catching on in the stores, especially ones like Whole Foods.

But if not, any baby greens (spinach or romaine) would work fine and mix them up for more variety too if you feel like it.

Raw Coconut Vinegar

I also stumbled across this new-to-me product:
Raw Organic Coconut Vinegar by Coconut Secret,
which claims to be even more nutritious than organic apple cider vinegar, so I decided to give it a spin for something different.  I do like it.

So this recipe I'm about to share moves away from oils in the salad dressing. Since I am new to this idea,  I turned to Dr. Joel Fuhrman's book, Eat For Health for recipe ideas.

I LOVE this book as it covers not just the nutritional research side and lots of recipes but also explores the emotional component of food addictions and how to stop their control over our diets.

This book was just recently republished from what I have as a two book set into a single paperback.  Highly recommend!

Dr. Furhman is an advocate of a low fat diet but is a big fan of using nuts (in limited amounts) in the diet for the good fats and benefits. His research shows that nuts are especially beneficial to consume with greens, as they help you to absorb more nutrients from them. So his plan is to use the nuts in place of oils in salad dressing and not as snacks.

So that's what I did. This recipe is adapted from Dr. Fuhrman's MishMash Salad with Orange Cashew Dressing in Eat For Health.

Baby Ruby Salad

Baby Ruby Salad with a Blood Orange Cashew Dressing

I decided to call it this because of the baby greens, and then because of the beautiful ruby colors of the blood oranges and the berries. Dr. Fuhrman's recipe calls for using his Blood Orange Vinegar but since I did not have any, I decided to go for the real thing and add the blood oranges directly to the salad and in the dressing.

Baby Ruby Salad Ingredients

Ingredients:

Blood Orange Cashew Dressing:

2 blood oranges (regular is fine too), peeled and seeded

1/4 cup cashews

2 tablespoons organic vinegar (apple cider vinegar, like Bragg's would be good too)

2 carrots grated (for sweetness) 

orange juice (optional)

Salad:

1 container of baby kale medley or mixed greens of choice
1 cup of blood orange sections
1 cup sliced organic strawberries (organic is important as these are like little sponges for pesticides.)
1/4 cup dried apricots, coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons raw pistachio nuts, unsalted and shelled

Directions:

Blend dressing ingredients in a high power blender until smooth and creamy. This should be fine in a regular blender too. It may just take a bit longer to get creamy. Add some orange juice if necessary to thin it a bit.

Toss salad ingredients in a big bowl and use dressing to taste. Extra dressing should keep in a covered container in the fridge for 3-5 days.

Baby Ruby Salad Close Up

So there you have it. A lovely and colorful salad brimming with all the goodness of kale and other greens but in tender bites. I'm a sucker for the ruby color of the veins in the swiss chard. 

I hope you give it a try.  Do you use nuts in your dressing to replace oil? It gives it a creamy texture don't you think? Would love to hear from you.

Until next time, Happy Healthy Eating.

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