Cost Effective, Delicious/Nutritious Greens: Chinese Cabbage Salad

Top 100 nutritarian recipes, Here I Come!

That's how I think of this one. It's a favorite, but I sometimes go months between having it. Whenever I get bored with other, more standard fare, this one is a candidate to come out of the file and transform my dinner table, once again.

It's more important than just a recipe, to show some basic principles:

• It takes a common, typically least expensive green and transforms it into a delight.
• It uses more expensive ingredients sparingly for taste, color and texture.
• It's endlessly variable with different ingredients possible. In fact, you can make a great knockoff without a single identical ingredient.

It saves well in the refrigerator. I find it's great up to four or five days later. The only disadvantage is it's something I'd never freeze (but I might use in a batch of lentil soup, and freeze that!)

It uses less-than-ideal ingredients very sparingly. Nutritarian recipes don't have to be perfect in every regard. Things that would be poison in larger quantities are of great value when they are, literally, the "spoonful of sugar" that helps the much larger quantity of supercalifabulistic nutritional medicine go down.

Who'da thought it, Mary Poppins as the expression of the Nutritarian Code of Ethical Eating - at least of mine;)

Ingredients:

• 1 large head cabbage
• 1 bunch green onions
• 1 cup thin sliced celery
• 1/2 thin sliced x 1" long green or red pepper
• 1 cup sliced spinach (1/4" slices)
• 1 cup sunflower seeds
• 1/2 cup coarse chopped almonds
• 1 tsp. chicken base
• 1/2 cup rice vinegar
• 1 tbspn. brown sugar

Chop cabbage as for slaw, add chopped green onions, celery, green or red pepper, sunflower seeds and almonds. Blend together the rice vinegar, chicken base and brown sugar. Pour over salad, toss and chill.

The only thing different here is I added 1/2 cup frozen edemame (green soy beans, not in pods) since I had some left over from the prior weekend. We love the color and the taste.

This is also great with lettuce or any other salad greens. One of our very favorite variations is to  replace the rice vinegar with a fruit or berry vinaigrette, and use walnuts instead of sunflower seeds and almonds.

Wow, makes me hungry just thinking about it. Perhaps I'll re-think that top 100 rating, this may be top 10 material.

But beware of standard cookbooks or on line recipes. They mostly all call for significant amounts of oil in the dressing. As far as I'm concerned, oil adds nothing to the taste, and does nothing but ruin the nutritional profile.

The biggest lie here is that olive oil makes it a healthy food. Wow, what a whopper.

All I'm giving up here is heart disease, diabetes, and a bunch of other bad, bad possibilities.

You're welcome.