This time of summer can be the hardest time to get inspired to cook. Here’s an idea for a highly nutritious veggie platter that is fresh and light. It is simple enough to serve for a casual lunch or breakfast meal, but could also serve as a beautiful appetizer for a party. Kids love to dip the veggies into a sauce or hummus that you can put in the middle of the vegetables. Here we used red cabbage, carrots, cauliflower florettes, collard greens and stems, and a parsley-tahini sauce. In macrobiotic cooking, this is called a “blanched salad,” which is comprised of a root vegetable (carrots), round vegetable (cabbage, cauliflower), and a leafy green vegetable (collard greens). The vegetables should be fresh, vibrant, and crisp– very different from steamed or boiled vegetables.
To make a blanched salad, thinly slice a variety of root, round, and leafy vegetables. Bring a pot of water to a rapid boil. The bigger the pot, the more boiling water to cook your veggies very quickly (in seconds). Dip vegetables into boiling water, a handful at a time, and remove after a few seconds with a metal skimmer or spider tool onto a big platter to cool. Make sure pot comes back up to a boil before adding the next handful. Arrange the cooled vegetables on a platter with a dipping sauce. A recipe for parsley-tahini sauce is below.
Blanched Salad – made by culinary student Stephanie Crain during the macrobiotic module at the Natural Epicurean
Parsley Tahini Sauce
¼ cup tahini
½ cup spring or filtered water
2 teaspoons organic umeboshi vinegar
1 teaspoon shoyu or tamari
2 tablepoons parsley leaves, chopped finely
Whisk ingredients together in medium-sized bowl. Add more water if you’d like the sauce to be a little thinner.
Chef Rachel Z 