Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Pad Thai salad

January 6, 2013


We had four zucchinis in our veggie box last week, and we diligently used them all up before they lost their freshness. And as soon as we got through them, one of Cindy's colleagues gave her the biggest zucchini you've ever seen. So it was back to the drawing board. I was quite taken by the zucchini ribbons that Cindy whipped up a few days earlier, so we went for another recipe that used the same basic approach - vegangela's raw pad thai.

This was more involved, with a fair bit of peeling and slicing to turn the veggies into ribbons. But once you've got them all prepped you're basically done, so it's still something you could put together on a weeknight. We made it even more suitable to the lazy cook by dropping the green onions and sprouts, swapping out real ginger and garlic for pickled and powdered respectively and by just using the peanut butter we had in the cupboard instead of the almond butter. And it was still pretty damn good - fresh and healthy, with lots of crunch and oodles of flavour from the dressing. 

This version of the recipe still only used up half of our zucchini, but made ridiculous amounts of food - we were eating it for days. I was impressed with how well it held up - things got a bit soggy but it maintained a surprising freshness even two or three days later, and the longer you left it the more the flavours soaked into the veggies.


Pad Thai salad
(adapted from vegangela's recipe)

1/2 cup or so of roasted peanuts

vegetables
3 cups zucchini, sliced into ribbons
2 cups red cabbage, shredded
2 small carrots, sliced into ribbons
2 teaspoons pickled ginger, finely chopped

dressing
1/4 cup tahini
1/4 cup peanut butter
juice of 1 lime
1/4 cup tamari
2 tablespoons agave nectar
shake of garlic powder

Combine all the dressing ingredients in a big bowl and whisk them together. 

Throw in the veggies and toss, making sure everything get nicely coated. Let it sit for a while if you've got time, the veggies will soften more and soak up the dressing. 

Serve, with the peanuts thrown in at the last minute.

2 comments:

  1. Made something similar to this last week - so nice to have a taste of home-ish after too many bland English meals over winter.

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  2. This is a really nice meal. Never really thought to each raw zucchini but in this weather I decided it would be a good time to try. We changed the ingredients a bit as we had no red cabbage so used some cucumber and celery and spring onions (no garlic powder). Was a bit dressing heavy (possibly as we didn't let it sit) but just used the rest of the dressing on other salad. Also added some home made marinaded baked tofu to it for extra protien.

    Hb just picked another zuc today so am going to try the almond pesto salad this week. Think I will add basil to that since we have that in abundance even after the pesto making session I had on saturday!

    Thanks for this idea (saw it a while ago on the blog report but hadn't had the occasion to try until now).

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