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Spontaneous Vietnamese Salad…& Other Spontaneities

Posted Jun 13 2010 12:00am

Just a few days before I wrote my last post on the anatomy of my salads , the truth is that I started to get really sick of eating the same kind of salads I’d been eating all week–kale, lettuce, parsley, and some weird stuff thrown on top. And since I know I told you all that variety is key to making a salad-eating habit work, I decided to practice what I preach: I took a trip to the store one evening, abstained from buying kale, and acquired some goods that I normally would not buy.

The next morning, I woke up knowing exactly what I was going to make for breakfast:

Spontaneous Viet-inspired Salad

Vegetables

3 cups of bean sprouts
1 cup of cilantro
1/2 red pepper, sliced
1/4 cup shredded carrots
1/4 cup sliced snowpeas

Dressing:

1/4 cup coconut milk
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp honey (preferably raw)
sea salt to taste

Toppings:

1/4 cup of Raw cashews (roasted peanuts would work better, but alas, I had none on hand!)
Black sesame seeds
1/2 sliced avocado
Handful of raisins

DIRECTIONS:

Mix vegetables together. Whisk dressing together and pour on top of vegetables. Top with toppings. If these directions sound lame, it’s because they are. Spontaneity is not supposed to have directions, remember?

Anyways–this Viet-inspired salad was the perfect kale-salad-rut/cycle-breaker: the bean sprouts made for a light crispy salad, balanced out with aromatic crunchy roasted peanuts raw cashews, all doused in refreshing lemon juice. Jazzed up with fresh cilantro and drizzled in a dreamy coconut-milk dressing, my lovely spontaneous salad hinted at sweet-and-savoury perfection…

Just trust me. The salad was good.

In the same vein, all my kitchen creations have been pretty spontaneous as of late. The various reasons can really be distilled down to two:

But seriously–I just can’t follow directions properly. Recipes for me are like chains. Whenever I see a 1/2 cup measurement for water, my primal instinct is to wonder, Can I add a full cup? Reading “Blend 1/2 cup of pre-soaked cashews” somehow translates in my mind as “LET’S SEE IF I CAN GRIND SESAME SEEDS IN MY COFFEE GRINDER!!!!” I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that sometimes even the simple direction, “Bake at 400 degrees F”, will suddenly create in me an irrepressible urge to run around the house screaming, “DO YOU KNOW THE MUFFIN MAN?! DO YOU KNOW THE MUFFIN MAN?!?!?!”

…And so forth. The point is that I can’t do recipes. Ah, the joys of being stubbornly creative.