Salads + edible flowers + quick frozen desserts = hearty summer fare

October 15, 2021 – Chances are, if you equate salads with rabbit food, flowers with poison and frozen desserts with practice in patience, that you aren’t vegetarian/vegan. If you are, honey, have you got a lot to learn.

Now, maybe rabbits do eat fruit, cooked grains, beans or bean products, cooked or raw vegetables besides greens, but I haven’t seen them.  According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, pet rabbits need mostly hay, grass and clean water. According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, wild rabbits eat weeds, clover, grasses, wildflowers and vegetable plants when its warm; bark, buds, evergreen needles and any remaining green plants when it’s cold.  Had I known, I never would have joked that I was part rabbit.

Last month at our family’s funeral repast, the most popular dish among vegetarians and meat-eaters was black-eyed pea salad. So the good news is that stereotypes for rabbits or salads aren’t necessary. Ocean Robbins of the Food Revolution Network reminds us that the first salads were merely salted vegetables. Nutritionist Deepa recommends farmers markets and community gardens to vary our salads; the urban farms demonstrate that.

Instead of bacon bits today, Robbins suggests nuts, seeds, spices and nutritional yeast for toppings.  Dianne Renner of Wilkerson’s Food Pantry adds edible flowers, whose names and uses are listed in https://whatscookingamerica.net/edibleflowers/edibleflowersmain.htm . Nick Polizzi of the Sacred Science highlights three common salad spices – gentian, ginger and fennel –  in https://www.thesacredscience.com/3-herbs-to-heal-your-gut .

For salad dressing Robbins suggests either a few squeezes of lemon juice or those included in seven recipes he’s collected at https://foodrevolution.org/blog/healthy-salads/?utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=sms&utm_campaign=blo-2021&utm_content=salad-recipes . Other salad resources can be found by clicking on Resources at the top of this page, then Recipes.

Instead of beginning with soup, on hot days I suggest ending with frozen plant-based desserts.  Two that take less than three hours are Jane Land’s Easy Peasy Banana Icecream at https://veganuary.com/en-us/recipes/easy-peasy-banana-ice-cream/ and Nutritionist Deepa’s 5 minute Dairy-free Strawberry Ice Cream, which is available in her newsletter or via deepa@nutritionistdeepa.com . The September 2020 article of this blog offers more resources.

When was the last time you were creative with salad ingredients? Have you tried making plant-based frozen dessert?