Recipe Time: The mother salad

Surprisingly fillingTime for another recipe.  This is my answer to all the people who try to tell me they don’t have time to prepare their own food.  This one takes – tops – 5 minutes.  It’s paleo-friendly, macro and micro nutrient dense, and delicious.  I call it:

The Mother Salad:

Ingredients:  approx. 4 cups/ 2 handfuls/ 2.5 ounces of mixed salad greens;  1 small onion – diced; 1 bosc pear – cut into small pieces; 2 handfuls of walnuts; 1 tin of sardines – preferably packed in water w/no salt added; olive oil; red wine vinegar; ground black pepper.

Directions:

1)  Sauté the onion until the pieces begin to turn translucent (about 3 minutes over medium heat)

2)  Open the sardine tin, drain the water, and chop the fishes up into small pieces, adding some pepper.

3) In a large bowl, combine the salad greens, sautéed onion, walnuts, pear, and sardines.

4) In a small bowl, mix a decent amount of olive oil and a small dollop of red wine vinegar.  Grind in plenty of black pepper.  Wisk it all together and pour it into the salad.  Stir everything around until the salad is well mixed. Done!

I encourage you to experiment with other ingredients.  You can substitute an apple for the pear, or add goat cheese if you like it.

A word on the sardines…  A lot of people object to them.  I admit, they do kinda look like cat food when you first open the tin, and they have a strong taste, but I’ve found them to be extremely good when mixed with other ingredients.  And we all know that eating fish is very good for us.  But there’s another reason for eating sardines over other types of fish – sustainability.  The truth is we are drastically overfishing the world’s oceans and unless we change our behavior there may not be many fish left.  Sardines are small and reproduce extremely quickly, making them a more resilient food supply than other bigger fish like salmon, swordfish, and most types of whitefish.  I encourage you to factor these considerations into your food shopping and try making choices that move you down the food chain a little bit.  Doing so will help bring us closer to a sustainable food supply chain.