SUNSET SOUP (Raw)

This soup I invented because I didn't want to serve even the very delicious Raw Tomato Soup twice in a row. I had seen in Brigitte Mars' book Rawsome! a recipe for Carrot-Ginger Soup which needed carrots, some left chopped, not pureed, white miso, grated ginger, garlic and water. I figured I could branch off from that and brought out a few more ingredients (and skipped the garlic for this one), fiddled with proportions, kept tasting and came up with:

SUNSET SOUP (Raw)

1 orange
1 cup chopped raw carrots
1 cup chopped raw butternut squash
3/4 cup raw cranberries (ok, I'd frozen mine from a while ago, but they were still raw)
1 Tbsp grated ginger root
1-1/2 to 2 cups water (This is approximate. Fiddle around until it's the right consistency for you.)
1 Tbsp white miso
1 Tbsp Braggs amino/all-purpose seasoning
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
salt (if needed) to taste

Zest the orange, remove the white pith with a sharp knife and discard, slice and chop the orange flesh, removing seeds as you go.
Put all ingredients (including the orange zest, unless you want to reserve a few strands for garnish) into your blender and puree, adding more water if needed to get to the right consistency for you.

Garnish if you like with some of the orange zest - and a few dried cranberries would be pretty, I think.

Enjoy!

Fruited Spinach & Arugula Salad, Strawberries With Oranges

Just so you know that we really do eat some fresh, uncooked things (usually a salad that starts the meal), here's today's first-course luncheon salad.

FRUITED SPINACH AND ARUGULA SALAD

I mixed some argula in with some spinach, added small slices of one of those lovely Ontario-grown little red McIntosh apple, a small handful of raisins, three dried apricots (chopped), some slices of green bell pepper, a few slivers of sweet onion,a few sliced water chestnuts (for the texture and the flavour), and a couple of handfulls of yellow cherry tomatoes (so sweet!), halved. I think that was all ;) Everything was organic except the apricots and the water chestnuts.

For the dressing (remember, I'm stubborn and try not to use oil), I mixed balsamic with seasoned rice vinegar, added maybe half a teaspoon of mirin, about 1 tsp of the juice from a jar of ginger, and a tsp of a nice unsugared organic apricot jam. I whisked it all together, poured it on, tossed the salad, and there we were - surprised and delighted as well as hungry.

We usually have fruit after lunch (lunch is our main meal of the day, so we make a bigger deal of it than otherwise), sometimes just from our never-empty fruit basket, sometimes sliced into a fruit salad of some kind (although more rarely). Today my husband made -

STRAWBERRIES WITH ORANGES



This was so good. He sliced fresh organic strawberries into a bowl, added the zest of 1 organic valencia orange, the orange itself (peeled, seeded and chopped), a little sweetener, and a Tbsp Grand Marnier. It was a lovely fresh ending to a nice light meal.

I should add that I also like strawberries with chopped mango, strawberries with chopped mint, strawberries with more strawberries, etc. etc. etc.