Your Garden Can Be Your Salad “Bar”
Gardens and salads go together! While some of the first produce from spring gardens are green like spinach and lettuce, our gardens can be our “salad bar” throughout the growing season.
As you plan to plant your garden, plant the vegetables you’ll need as ingredients. Here is a list for starters.
ü
Cabbage
ü Sweet peppers (red and green)
ü Green onions
ü Carrots
ü Beans (Green and Wax)
ü Fresh Dill
ü Spinach
ü Lettuce
ü Tomatoes
ü Green Peas
ü Broccoli
With these few “ingredients” from your garden, some salads you could prepare include:
ü
Copper Pennies (marinated carrots)
ü Slaw
ü Three-Bean Salad
ü Spinach Salad
ü Layered Lettuce
ü Marinated Vegetables
ü Carrot-Raisin Salad
ü (Add your favorite to the list)
Fresh vegetables provide fiber to our diets along with ample Vitamins A and C. They generally are low-calorie until we add the sauces and dressings in preparation. But we can make some adaptations to our home-prepared dressings so they taste terrific and contain less oil—and fewer calories.
The trick to making low-calorie dressings is to substitute pectin (yes, the kind we make jams and jellies with) for part or all of the oil. The pectin thickens the mixture to look and pour like dressings.
To adapt your recipes follow these easy steps.
1. Replace all or part of the oil in the recipe with water. It’s your call on the amount.
2. Figure the total amount of liquid in your recipe. Add up the amount of water, vinegar, syrup, juice, etc.
3. For every 1½ cups liquid, add 2 to 3 tablespoons of dry pectin. (Depends on thickness desired.)
4. Allow your mixture to refrigerate several hours to thicken. You can put it on the salad as your recipe directs or store in a shakable container. Some dressings on salads are great on other types of salads too!
On the back of this newsletter are several dressings and salads that use pectin in the dressing.
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Taste of Harvest Newsletter Janet Hackert, Editor hackertj@missouri.edu Last revised: 04/23/04 |
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