Confetti Salad

For my first meal from this week's amazing bounty, I decided to try The New Moosewood Cookbook's raw vegetable salad. Basically, the idea is that any vegetable can be eaten raw if you chop it small enough, so grab whatever you have -- the more different kinds and colors, the better -- and mince or grate them all. I picked squash, zucchini, scallions, and purple pepper from our CSA box, as well as carrots and celery that we had on hand. (A cucumber is pictured, but I didn't end up using it.) The celery was the only thing I minced manually; I used the kitchen shears on the scallions and threw everything else in to my trusty salad shooter. Consequently, this salad took about five minutes to prepare.

See how pretty it looks with all the different colors? Like confetti. Once everything is chopped or grated, just stir it up and add the salad dressing of your choice.

I decided to take another page from Moosewood and use their green salad dressing. It's a slightly odd mix of fresh herbs, spinach (or kale, in my case, since we didn't have spinach), lemon juice, and buttermilk. It was fresh and tangy and worked well with the raw veggies. The overall effect was very light and tasty; there's something about this salad that reminds me of fresh salsa, even though it's not spicy. It would make an incredible burrito filling -- I'm thinking with mashed pink pintos and a little queso blanco in a whole wheat tortilla. Yum!

Using leftover rice

Even after eating leftover stir fry for lunch Sunday and packing some in Dan's bento for Monday, we still had some jasmine rice left over. The New Moosewood Cookbook's very simple rice pudding recipe is a great way to use up leftovers. Basically, you put two cups of cooked rice with one cup of milk in a saucepan, bring almost to a boil, then simmer for about twenty minutes, or until all the milk is absorbed and the rice is creamy. Then you remove from heat and stir in the seasonings of your choice. I usually use a small squirt of lemon juice, some vanilla extract, cinnamon, nutmeg, and either maple syrup or sugar. It doesn't need much sweetening, and it's a nice, satisfying dessert that is low-fat (at least until you put whipped cream on it, like we usually do).