Menu Mondays: Baker's Dozen Salad

Fear not! This salad's phenomenal taste is
indirectly proportional to the blandness of its photo. 

BAKER'S DOZEN SALAD (aka that grilled veggie salad thing)--In the book Eat to Live, author Joel Fuhrman, M.D. advises his patient to stick a sign to the refrigerator that says, "THE SALAD IS THE MAIN DISH," and Married With Veggies took that advice as a challenge! The Baker's Dozen Salad whips 12 vegetables into a delicious frenzy (13 if you think corn counts as a vegetable the way Mr. Married With Veggies does). Even better than packing a shit ton of veggies into one meal? The recipe provides opportunities for iterations limited only by the produce in your refrigerator. And best yet, the theory of the salad (as much as a salad can have a theory, anyway) is simply* this:

-- whip together a traditional salad two to three times the size of a garden salad in a restaurant;
-- toss your favorite cooked veggies and  beans into a skillet with water or your favorite oil;
-- dump the hot stuff on top of the cold stuff;
-- dress with diced avocado, seeds, and your favorite dressing, and dig into a green meal that will leave you feeling satisfied for hours and hours and hours.  

But maybe you need a hit of the baker's dozen goodness as is in a recipe before you see how this concept can be the basis of many of your best stand-at-the-fridge-and-choose-ingredients-to-improvise-a-meal dinners. So here's a recipe that incorporates what I think to be the ideal base. Try it, love it, then improvise away!

How worried should I be that my warring veggie factions seem to have adopted gang colors? 

THE TEAM: We tried to get a nice family photo of Team Baker's Dozen Salad--we really did. But a rift has developed between the cold team and the hot team. The cold team can understand how the beans, the frozen corn, and the mushrooms might prefer to be cooked (though the cold team points out that mushrooms are a fungus and not truly a vegetable), but they see the defection of the asparagus, zucchini, and green peppers as a betrayal of the highest order. Personally, I think the raw veggies have a collective inferiority complex because the American diet pretty much ignores them, but whatever.  As a direct result of my failure to mediate the vexed veggies, I have been directed to list the teams separately.

The traitorous three ringing the sunflower seeds

THE HOT TEAM

• 1 tbsp Earth Balance whipped buttery spread (use an oil if you like, but I think there's nothing like a mushroom with a  buttery taste soaked in)
• 5 spears of asparagus snapped into roughly 1-inch pieces
• 0.5 cup frozen yellow sweet corn
• 0.5 cup diced zucchini
• 1 cup diced  green bell pepper
• 1 cup sliced fresh mushrooms (for the love of all that is holy about your time, buy them pre-washed and sliced!) 
• .25 cup water
• 1 cup pre-cooked black beans (you could use any beans you have on hand--cooked chick peas are phenomenal, too, but I thought black beans would show up better in photographs)
• 0.5 oz raw sunflower seeds (roughly 2.5 tBsp)
• 0.25 cup diced raw onions 

Mediation between factions was going GREAT until...

...the carrots decided to get together to flip off the hot team *sigh*

THE COLD TEAM

Diced avocado

• 3 cups baby spinach (3 cups of any green leafs, really, but spinach is delicious and ridiculously nutritious. Technically, I use 2 cups of spinach and a cup of baby arugula blend because I like the mingling of flavors, but the choice is yours.)
• 0.5 cup chopped broccoli 
• 0.5 cup baby carrots
• 0.5 cup diced celery 
• 1 cucumber, peeled and cut into half moons (The half moon shape is not strictly necessary, but it makes me happy.)
• 1 tomato, diced 
• 0.5 cup diced red peppers
• 2 tBsp lemon juice (roughly the juice from half a lemon)
• 1 tBsp balsamic vinegar 
• Half an avocado, diced and set aside

GAME PLAN

The dump! 

STEP 1. Heat the Earth Balance in a skillet on high until it starts to sizzle, then dump the hot ingredients into the pan.  And, yes, I really mean dump it all in a big mountain of hot team goodness. If you really need direction, then start with the onions, but seriously, throw it all in there. Stir until most of the hot ingredients are shiny with Earth Balance, then let the lot cook at high until the pan starts wafting out a  buttery mushroom flavor. And if you've gone and left out the mushrooms (Why would you do such a thing?! Did I not explicitly mention the joys of their buttery GOODNESS??!!)and are worrying about how the heck you'll know  it's time to move on if you don't have your Pavlov mushroom smell to motivate you, then fine--let the lot cook at high for about a minute and then turn the pan down to a more respectable medium  temperature.  Add the water to the skillet now. 


STEP 2.While the hot ingredients cook down, separate the spinach between two big salad bowls. Split the broccoli, carrots, celery, cucumber, tomatoes, and red pepper between the two bowls. Give the hot mixture a quick stir. Water should be boiling off while you're working. 

See? Impossible to miss!

STEP 3. Squeeze about 2 tablespoons of juice from half a lemon, and combine with 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar. Tip: Because squeezing a lemon can be a pain in the ass, do it over a large measuring cup so that you don't have to add aiming to your troubles. Also, if you want to get one of those plastic lemons from your produce aisle and skip the whole fresh squeezed routine, I'm totally down with that. But holy mother of god are you totally neglecting team hot right now??? For the love of all that is holy, give team hot a ride on the wooden spoon, stat! 

STEP 4. Remove the hot vegetables from the heat and spoon the contents onto the top of the two bowls filled with raw salad components. The vegetables will look a wee bit tired--the corn may have even browned--but while this might be overcooked as a stand-alone side dish, the slightly overdone consistency means these veggies  have definitely released all inner sweetness (hello carmelized onions!). Top with half the dressing each, mix, and  eat it all, and I'm totally serious about that: eat it ALL!

Don't throw away my favorite part of the salad, dude! 

STEP 5. Dude, I totally told you to eat it all. That stuff at the bottom that looks like litter? That's a flavor bomb of beans and avocado and sweet, sweet corn that's been basically steeping in the lemony goodness the whole time you've been munch, munch, munching your way down to it--it's it's pretty much the best part, so if you're really going to insist on tossing it, can I eat it?

445 calories, 17 grams fat, 161 mg sodium, 21 grams fiber, 18 grams protein (per calculator on sparkpeople.com)**

Happy Menu Monday from Married With Veggies! 


* I have OFFICIALLY turned into my mother. She's no vegan, but ask her for one of her recipes, and she'll slap her hand on her knee and, in a faded (but still adorable) French-Canadian accent, kickstart an on-the-spot recitation of the what-for with the following three words: "It's very easy!"


** The fat is coming from the avocado, the sunflower seeds and the Earth Balance. Change your mix and shave fat and calories, though remember--the avocado and the sunflower seeds are the good guys in this three-fat fight . ****


***I'm putting this in as a guideline, but I'm not 100 percent sure this is accurate. 


**** I am not a nutritionist. I don't even play one on TV!