RAW BEET SALAD

Here I am, gnawing and crunching away at raw fruits and vegetables - and loving it. I had recently bought a kilogramme of beets ('beetroot' to any of you in the UK and what I used to call them until recently), which we usually cook for salads, soups, other dishes. But I ran across a recipe that suggested one could grate them raw with apple for a salad, then use a raw vegan almond 'mayonnaise' to dress it and sprinkle it with sesame seeds. Simple :) Being me, absolutely determined to pervert the course of true cuisine, however, I went in a slightly different direction:

RAW BEET SALAD

3 Tbsp wakame seaweed, soaked and finely chopped
1/2 kg beets, peeled and grated (I used a food processor attachment to my wand blender to do mine)
1/2 kg apples, peeled and grated
1 Tbsp white miso
1 Tbsp Bragg's Liquid Aminos / All-Purpose Liquid Soy Seasoning (instead of Tamari, which I'm sure would taste fine)
handful of Italian parsley
good pinch of cayenne
ginger root (your choice how much), finely chopped
squeeze or two of lemon (optional)
salt and peppe (if needed) to taste
GARNISH: sesame seeds (optional - but they look pretty against the colours of the

Throw all into your blender, except for the garnish. Chill and serve with those sesame seeds if you like. Good food.

NOTE: the dressing (everything except the first three ingredients and the garnish) is entirely up to you. We love to use seaweeds in salads and soups and anything else we can stick them into - or much them on our own, but if you don't care for them (have you TRIED them all? Wunnerful!), then by all means skip.

Sweet Potato & Carrot Casserole With Apple, Spiced Chickpeas, Salad

Last Sunday lunch was a comedy of errors! I foound this great (I thought - and no doubt it is!) recipe in Finlayson's 125 Best Vegetarian Slow Cooker Recipes (a book I highly recommend, by the way.) and thought Why Not! It takes a can of (crushed) pineapple (which we don't use, but all the better reason for trying the recipe), so my dh said he'd run down to the Convenience Store (we have two of them in this block alone) for it. Meanwhile I started on the recipe - tried to give a shout out the door to pick up some carrots too (I said it was a comedy!) since it required six, but he'd already left in the elevator. Never mind, I had a couple of small carrots plus lots of sweet potatoes. I was okay for a chickpea topping, since I tend to keep cooked chickpeas in the freezer. Well, wouldn't you know it: neither shop had pineapple - crushed, sliced, chunked or in any form whatsoever, and there wasn't time to wait for the market to open. Also, of course, no time to use the slowcooker anyway - AND we had an appointment early afternoon so had to have our lunch earlier than usual (I remembered just in time).

So what I did was use sweet potatoes and a little carrot, sliced, mostly cooked in a pan on top of the stove. Deciding to abandon any idea of Finlayson's interesting recipe, I flew by the seat of my pants. I layered the veg in a casserole with three apples (I believe they were galas) sliced but not peeled, sprinkled each layer with nutmeg, cinnamon, the zest of a big orange and heaven knows what else, mixed a little flour with a little sugar and a little orange juice to drizzle through the whole thing and put it in the oven to bake for however long I thought it'd take. When I figured it was nearly ready I put some orange chunks on top and a sprinkle of sesame seeds to add 'interest'.

Didn't have a hope! But it started to smell wonderful and we found it was delicious - and it's worth going back to soon to try to work this recipe out properly. It took a couple of days to get through, but we didn't leave a scrap.

I paired this dish with a spiced chickpea dish (the recipe I couldn't make required a chickpea topping and I'd already thawed them). The Indian spices were a nice match with the fruity taste of the sweet potato and apple dish, if a little unconventional. (Er, just a bit!)



This was quickly thrown together - onion, celery, green pepper, coriander, cummin, cayenne, fenugreek, turmeric, and whatever else my hand lighted on, topped with coriander leaves (cilantro).

We had a salad while we waited for the main course to finish cooking.