Kale and beet salad

All salads are not necessarily healthy. It depends on what dressing you are using and what actually goes inside the salad. Recently, I am a big fan of kale and try to incorporate it into our meals regularly.

Here is one simple recipe of a salad that is extremely tasty and healthy.

Ingredients: (serves 2)

Organic kale about 8/10

Baby spinach organic about 8/10 leaves

½ big beet boiled and cut in chunks

½ orange peeled and cut

2 tbsp apple cider

1 tbsp white rice vinegar

¼ thinly sliced red onion

6/7 organic red cherry tomatoes

½ chopped red bell pepper

Nuts of your choice or sunflower seeds

In a bowl, place the washed kale and spinach leaves and add boiled and cut beet. Cut open the orange after peeling it and use about ½ in the salad. Add the cherry tomatoes and chopped red bell pepper. Now, pour the apple cider and white rice vinegar and serve. This salad tastes sweet and tangy. It goes very well with pasta.

Oil free Falafel

Ingredients:

2 cups chickpeas/garbanzo beans

1 small onion roughly chopped

¼ cup cilantro

3-5 cloves garlic

1 ½ tsp besan flour

Salt to taste

2 tsp cumin seeds

1 pinch of cardamom

Soak the garbanzo beans overnight in a bowl of water and then drain water in the morning. Pour them in the mixer/processor along with the chopped onion, cilantro (you can use parsley), flour, salt, garlic, cumin and cardamom. Pulse it together to form a coarse paste. Refrigerate this coarse, thick paste for about 3 hours.

After 3 hours, remove the paste from the refrigerator and you can either bake them or cook them in the ebelskiver pan using oil spray. Cover the pan and cook them till they are golden brown on both sides.

For the wrap, I used whole wheat pita bread and added tomato, onion, cucumber slices, baby spinach with some tahini sauce (homemade) and yogurt with some dill.  

Semolina and jaggery cake

Lately I have been making most of the cakes with honey and applesauce just to avoid sugar. Somehow, I got bored of the taste of honey in the cakes, so with this cake I decided to try jaggery. This cake tastes exactly like the one my Mom used to make when I was a kid and when there were no fancy ovens. So, do you want to indulge in the same taste again? But, this is with a healthier touch :)

Ingredients

1 1/2 cup semolina coarse

1/2 cup almond meal

2 tbsp clarified butter

1/2 cup applesauce (unsweetened homemade from organic apples)

1/4 cup powdered jaggery

2 tbsp low fat plain yogurt (I used Mountain high)

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp cardamom powder

1 pinch salt

Mix all the dry ingredients- semolina,almond meal, baking powder, salt, and cardamom powder in a bowl and mix together.

In a separate bowl, mix the clarified butter and add whisked yogurt, applesauce and jaggery powder and whisk together. Once it is smooth, add in the dry ingredients and whisk together for a minute or so. If the batter is not smooth and runny, you might want to add some more yogurt or applesauce. Pour the batter in a greased baking pan (I used oil spray) and put it in the preheated oven and bake for 25 minutes on 350 F.