An Extraordinary Salad

Can’t take credit for this one, people, but wanted to share this wonderful salad ‘recipe’ with you.  Its  one of Vicky’s creations, and one of my favorites.  I think the orange adds an extra zing to the flavor combo.

Mixed greens, oranges, green onions, carrots, blue cheese, and toasted almonds (all organic,) and free range chicken breast, all topped with her homemade poppy seed dressing, which is also mostly organic ingredients.  Vicky is a fanatic for the best and most healthy foods.

Here’s a picture of what I picked up at the gym this afternoon.  This is probably one of my all-time most favorite foods.  The combination is just stupendous.  Wish I had a recipe for you.

Vicky’s Red Lentil and Rice Salad with Curried Yogurt Dressing.  Ingredients include brown rice, red lentils, apples, raisins, sunflower seeds, peanuts, unsweetened coconut, nonfat yogurt, grapeseed mayonnaise, natural cane sugar, curry, sesame tahini, ginger, and lemon.  Again almost all organic ingredients.  Nectar of the gods, I’m telling you.

Its funny, because looking at that picture, this is a food I would have REFUSED to even taste in my former life.  And in fact, when I stopped to talk to Vicky tonight there was a man explaining to Vicky that he could not eat the food she was providing on one of her food programs.  It was just too different than what he was used to.  And Vicky nicely tried to explain that it does take time for your taste buds to change, but it was possible.   Hey, look what I did for you.  Googled the ingredients and came up with a recipe that sounds VERY familiar! I’ll probably just keep buying it from Vicky.  That’s a lot of ingredients to deal with.

So.  The fact that I like this dish SO MUCH leads me to my next topic.  I was working on my ‘Do You Use Food to Cope?’ workbook tonight, and was tabulating some information,* and came to the conclusion that I eat a LOT of sweet food.  Are any of you as surprised as I was by that discovery?  I guess I shouldn ‘t be surprised, but I actually was.  And, I discovered that I am not eating enough vegetables.  That is just silly.  Because vegetables are the way to go.   And I like vegetables.  Now, it could be that this is an unusual week, but I don’t think so.  I think I just tend to ‘drift’ towards sweets, and the veggies go bye-bye.  And just so you know, when I say sweets, I am talking about TVP Carrot  Cake, Lo-bars, fruit, custard oatmeal with raisins, that red lentil and rice salad, yogurt with muesli, walnuts, and a few chocolate chips, that kind of thing.  But still.  Too much of a good thing can lead to an unbalanced diet.

* The workbook had me keep a complete food journal for a week, just writing down the food, time, location, and activity.   This was a little different than I have done in the past, which was basically just a list of the foods and the points/calorie count.  It was pretty interesting to review.  As far as location,  I am not going to address that too much, except that little bad habit of taking a snack to bed with me.  Gonna nip that one in the bud!  But I live alone, and I don’t actually have a dining room table any more (that’s my sewing studio,) and I don’t think its terrible that I eat while I am reading or watching something on the computer.  Sometimes I do just eat and stare at my food.  And sometimes I do enjoy it more that way.

Okay, to end this post, here are a couple of amusing shots from tonight’s walk.  It is actually cool outside tonight, and so I had the brilliant idea to take all three dogs for a walk, since Noah doesn’t seem to have as much energy in the evening.  I actually used to do this all the time when I had the three dachshunds and Oliver.  But this is a new combo.  And this was our first attempt.  It went pretty well until I stopped for a photo op.

The end.