Carrot Salad

On Tuesday of this week Dr. Pan made the journey south from Pullman to visit HSU and see how the soil fertility course was rounding out the semester. My students put together pretty strong presentations and I was very satisfied with the projects they had put together. Anyway, after class ended and we had toured around Arcata a bit, we went to a Japanese restaurant for dinner. Part of my meal was a little cup of cucumber salad, with some sort of vinegar-based dressing on it. That tasty little salad has left me dwelling on veggie slaws, and led to the yummy carrot creation I just whipped up.

I julienned carrots on the mandolin slicer my aunt gave me for Christmas, which made the job a lot easier! I'd been dreading scraping my knuckles on a box grater, but remembered the mandolin and used it to quickly get the job done.

While rooting around the fridge for my carrots, I came across a cabbage (that's been there for a disturbingly long time). After peeling away the outermost leaves, I ran the cabbage over the mandolin. It didn't come out quite as cleanly as the carrot shreds had, but saved me a little bit of cutting.  

Then, further using what was left in the fridge, I chopped up an apple. I tried to make the pieces pretty small, but next time they'll need to be a bit smaller. Maybe even julienned on the mandolin?

 The dressing was made from 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 2-4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, a pinch of sugar, and a pinch of salt.

Then I did a kind of silly thing. Because the bowl I had started the whole process in was too small to distribute the dressing on the salad, I dumped the carrot-cabbage-apple mixture onto my cutting board. It kept me from dirtying another dish, and made mixing quite easy. I just drizzled my dressing over the top, mixed everything around on the board a bit, and put it back into the bowl.

I topped my serving with a little bit of slivered almonds and dug right in! While it was delicious, and definitely exactly what I was craving today, there are a number of things I will change for the future. The olive oil flavor was very noticeable, which means that in the future I'll use less of it, and/or an oil with less flavor. The lemon didn't come through strong enough, so I'll probably bump that amount up. And the apple bits need to be a little smaller if they want to be more conducive with the salad as a whole. Even with those changes noted, it was delicious today!

This sweet little salad goes well with the BBQ tofu I've been cooking up this week. It's super simple: fry tofu on the stove until it's as crunchy as you want it, then pour on the BBQ sauce! I then cook for a little while longer (which probably isn't necessary), before pulling them out of the pan and eating in a taco or alongside some rice. It's a quick and easy way to dress up the otherwise bland tofu!

If you want to make your own Carrot Salad, here is the "recipe" that I went by.
1 cup julienned carrots
1 cup shredded cabbage
1 apple, chopped into small pieces

Dressing:
2-3 Tbl lemon juice
3-5 Tbl extra virgin olive oil
pinch of sugar
pinch of salt

Combine the carrots, cabbage, and apple. In another bowl, make the dressing. Pour over your veggie mixture, top with a few slivered almonds, and enjoy!