Super-healthy salad!
Here’s another great salad from my friend, raw food chef Megan Grocutt. She’s been providing me some fantastic raw (and semi-raw) recipes for my work recently. They’ve been interesting both in technique and flavor. Her recipes are relatively easy but brief in description, leaving me lots of latitude for minor tweaking and presentation. I took some slight liberties with this recipe, but the end result was pretty fabulous.
The kelp noodles are very interesting. They’re quite bland in and of themselves, but they absorb flavors nicely and they have a wonderful, alluring snap when you bite into them. Very low-cal, kelp noodles are a great addition to Asian-style salads, which is the way I used them here.
I took about 4 ounces of the kelp noodles and cut them into 3-inch pieces. I rinsed them and patted them dry with a clean kitchen cloth and then threw them into a mixing bowl. To the noodles I added about a half-cup of julienned carrots, a handful of finely chopped scallions, and one small-to-medium zucchini, which I had cut with a spiral slicer.
The spiral slicer (pictured below) is a pretty cool Japanese implement that can create fun and interesting noodle-like cuts from a variety of vegetables. After I cut the veg I sprinkled the zucchini strands with about a half-teaspoon of sea salt. The salt sweats out some of the moisture, leaving the zucchini pliable and more noodle-like. I drained the zucc and patted it dry of any extra moisture before adding it to the kelp noodles.
The dressing was a cinch: one-and-a-half teaspoons shiro miso (the pale-yellow, mild variety), one teaspoon tamari, one teaspoon organic rice vinegar, one teaspoon toasted sesame oil, one teaspoon of finely minced fresh ginger, a half-teaspoon of white sesame seeds, a half-teaspoon of sriracha for a hit of zest, and salt & pepper to taste. I mixed it all up and poured it over the noodle salad. I chucked the bowl into the fridge and let the flavors marry for twenty minutes.
When I pulled out the kelp noodle salad I checked for final seasoning and I added a pinch of salt. I served it up. And it was yummy!
You should be able to find Kelp Noodles in most health food stores.
Spiral-cutting is easy with this Japanese Benriner spiral slicer! About $60, it’s not a steal, but for me it’s worth it.
Would an Asian market have kelp noodles? In the refrigerated section? This looks delicious, I’ll give it a try! I guess I’ll have to Julienne the the zucchini, And put a spiral slicer on my wish list!
Whoa – looks yummy. Spiral-slicer is now on my wish list too! Thanks for the post.