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Another crop of delicious, cool summer salads.
ANNABEL COHEN
Special to the Jewish News
ot, heavy and overly starchy foods can leave you with a groggy,
sleepy, almost drugged feeling in the summertime. Add summer
temperatures in the 80s and you're done for.
As registered dietitian and health care consultant Beverly Price explains, "The
body needs to use a lot of energy to process high-fat and high-caloric foods. So
you use the energy that could be spent enjoying the weather to digest what
you've just eaten."
Price, who conducts semi-
nars and lectures about all
aspects of nutrition and
health, believes you should
listen to your body.
Instinctively, summer
brings the desire for lighter
meals and lots of vegetables.
"Your body craves nutrients
found in colorful vegetables
and fruits and innately knows
that these foods are easily
digested," said Price. It also
follows that the appetite for
cooler or uncooked foods
keeps us out of a hot kitchen.
Vegetables are like an emo-
tional antitoxin, making us
feel all-powerful and invigor-
ating. And almost no other
time of the year does a salad
Dulled white-bean pasta with roasted
not only suffice as a meal,
peppers, tomatoes and olives
but becomes a meal of
choice.
Salads are evolving. Chefs
are creating different, wilder and more complex combinations that break the
rules of our salad days — greens, tomatoes and dressing. Old-fashioned, garden-
variety combinations are now merely fallbacks, consolation for when there's
nothing else around. Indeed the lacier the lettuce and more otherworldly look-
ing the ingredients, the better.
Today, it's as if anything that can be chopped and tossed can become a salad.
Think of a favorite meal like roasted chicken and potatoes. This can be a salad.
Simply cube the chicken, dice the roasted potato and toss with arugula, dried
cranberries and chopped celery for crunch. For dressing, try one of the sugges-
tions below.
Need some other thought starters? There are books galore with recipes for fas-
cinating, ingenious and certainly resourceful combinations of ingredients to
please any liking. Main-Course Salads by Ray Overton is one such book. It's
loaded with salads with accents from around
the world.
Other works such as Salad
Days by Norman Koplas
and Michael Grand, plus
Susan Simon's
Insalate: Authentic
Salads For All
Seasons, have
beautiful pic-
tures of many
of the offer-
ings. All these
will get you
started in con-
cocting your
own salad cre-
ations.
Salad entrees
used to be like
quiche — chick
food. No longer. Real
men are eating salads by
the acre and proud of it. It
even fits into that low-carbohydrate
Spinach salad with dried fruits,
diet craze that lets you eat real dressing —
avocado and goat cheese
even that sloppy blue cheese kind — as long as
you skip the croutons and muffins.
Try some of the cool summer salad recipes below:
SPINACH SALAD WITH DRIED FRUITS, AVOCADO AND GOAT CHEESE
Salad:
12 cups baby spinach, washed
1 cup dried cherries, cranberries or blueberries
1-2 cups sliced mushrooms
1 cup thinly sliced Bermuda or red onion
1/2 cup cashews or toasted sliced almonds, optional
2 ripe avocados
crumbled goat cheese, garnish
Dressing:
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1 t. dried oregano
1 t. sugar
1/2 cup crumbled, soft, mild goat cheese (like chevre), room temperature
salt and pepper to taste
Toss spinach with cranberries, mushrooms, onions and nuts, if using.
Make dressing: Place all ingredients in a medium bowl and whisk until well
8/10
2001