Thursday, December 2, 2010

Complete-meal salad with basil

This super-sized salad is extremely easy to make and feeds a gigantic appetite. It's ready in 10 to 15 minutes and, although a salad, has enough proteins in it to feed a football team. Because it contains meat and cheese and eggs we recommend to skip any creamy dressing, but since it doesn't contain too many fats, you can add a little if you want to. We recommend it with some good apple cider (it springs up the basil flavor) and all year-round. 


Ingredients (serves 2 very hungry people):

  • 1 ration (about 150 g) of salad leaves and bits washed and cut (green salad, carrots, red cabbage leaves etc, about two handfuls)
  • 2 spoons of dried basil (if you have a handful of fresh leaves it's even better)
  • some pepper of mixed colors (red, green, black - avoid white here), freshly ground
  • some olive oil
  • a ration (about 25 g) of salad croutons (we chose a kind with pine-kernels in them)
  • 5-6 cherry tomatoes, washed (or 2 regular sized tomatoes)
  • 3 eggs
  • 100 g of boiled sweet corn kernels (easily found in cans, make sure they're preservative-free and preferably organic)
  • 100 g soft cheese, low on fats (any type will do)
  • 150 g of turkey breast file (best quality you can find)

Get all your ingredients ready. Put the main salad leaves in a big bowl:

Put the eggs in a pot filled with water over your heat source. Leave to boil for at least 5 minutes or while you complete the nest few steps:


Begin by breaking the turkey breast file in little threads with your hands. It's healthier to process your food like this when you can, because metal knives oxidize the food. So use them only with things like tomatoes which would be to complicated to tear with your fingers:


Do the same for the cheese:


Cut the little tomatoes in half, and then each half into 2 or three parts, as shown below:


Add the tomatoes too to the big salad:

You may take the eggs off the heat source now (unless you were faster than 5 minutes, case in which you need to be congratulated and do a victory dance while you leave the eggs to boil a little bit more :) ). Put them in the sink and leave some cold water pour over them for a minute or so:


In the meantime, add to the salad the sweetcorn, the croutons, the basil, pepper and a gurgle of olive oil (about 5-10 ml):


Mix everything together really well now, using two forks or spoons:

Get the eggs from the pot, gently remove their shells and cut them in 4-5 horizontal slices. Decorate the salad with the egg slices:

It's ready. Dig in!

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