A 3 Part Summer – Salads
Inspiration is a funny beast. I hear people say a lot that they are constantly challenged by the task of inventing new and interesting (occasionally even nutritious) meals for the family each night. It’s a lot like myself trying to come up with ideas about what to cook that would be worth sharing with a slightly wider audience than my immediate family.
As will become apparent though, my family is a large audience to begin with. Fortunately, every couple of months there is a new Coles recipe magazine to guide me. I already showed the Christmas magazine who was boss, now I have the chance to tackle the summer mag.
For Australia Day this year, all our dishes were from the Summer Magazine, no less than seven recipes in total were cooked and devoured on the day. We had 3 of the salads made up, 2 meat-based mains and finished off with 2 desserts. We’ll start with the salads here first and show you how we catered for our family.
Chicken & Mango Salad
Page 29
• SERVES 4 • PREPARATION 10 MINS + 15 MINS SOAKING TIME
100g Chang’s Thai-style Rice Noodles (rice stick noodles) 1 Coles Barbecued Chicken 100g Coles Classic Salad 2 mangoes, peeled, sliced 1 small red onion, halved, thinly sliced ½ cup Praise Italian Dressing 1 – Place noodles in a large heatproof bowl. Cover with boiling water and let soak for 15 mins, until tender. Drain noodles, rinse under cold water and drain again. Return to bowl.
2 – Meanwhile, remove chicken from carcass and shred meat. Add shredded chicken to noodles with remaining ingredients and toss to combine. Transfer salad to serving bowls.
As you can see, the recipe is very easy – basically cook the noodles and throw everything together. The “King of Fruits” makes a nice cameo here again. The end result is probably the least like the recipe picture out of any of the ones I have tried so far. We seem to have an abundance of lettuce and not many mangoes to go around. It was alright, but certainly not the star on the table.
Tropical Prawn Salad
Page 31
• SERVES 4 • PREPARATION 10 MINS
400g cooked peeled prawns, tails on ½ rockmelon, peeled, chopped 1 bunch mint, leaves picked 1 bunch coriander, leaves picked ¼ cup lime juice ¼ cup vegetable oil 2 tsp white sugar 1 tsp fish sauce 1 Place prawns, rockmelon, mint and coriander leaves in a bowl.
2 Whisk together remaining ingredients to make dressing. Pour over salad and toss to combine. Transfer to a large serving plate or bowl.
You might notice something remarkably different in the magazine picture and the one I took – and I don’t mean the $2 plastic salad bowl. You see, my wife likes seafood. Actually, she loves seafood. During her most recent pregnancy she abstained from her favourite food type, and this was her first chance to get back into it. I think you can notice it too. It’s less a prawn salad, and more a bowl of prawns with some green stuff hanging around..
Pumpkin Cous Cous Salad
Page 14
• SERVES 6 • PREPARATION 20 MINS • COOKING 45 MINS
1kg butternut pumpkin, cut into 3-4 cm chunks olive oil spray 200g green beans, ends trimmed 1 ½ cups chicken or vegetable stock 1 ¼ cups cous cous 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil 2 tbsp orange juice 2 tsp red wine vinegar ¼ cup slivered almonds, toasted 1 – Preheat the oven to 200°C or 180°C fan and line a baking tray with non-stick baking paper. Arrange the pumpkin onto the prepared tray, spray with oil and bake for 45 mins, or until soft and lightly browned. Cool.
2 – Drop the beans into a saucepan of boiling water and cook for 2 mins. Drain and cool
quickly under cold running water. Drain and
pat dry with paper towels.
3 – Place stock into a medium saucepan. Cover and bring to the boil. Turn off the heat, add the cous cous then immediately cover again. Stand for 5 mins. Transfer to a large bowl, drizzle with the olive oil and fluff up the grains with a fork. Add the pumpkin, beans, orange juice, vinegar, almonds and parsley. Toss to combine.
If you’ve got a copy of the magazine handy (or you look closely at the first image), you’ll notice I left the steak out of this dish, but that was only because we already had other meat dishes on the menu. For this salad though I think we achieved the goal of having a fair resemblance to the magazine picture. Despite being a vegetarian dish, the pumpkin salad goes really well with a stereotypical meat-heavy serving on Jan 26th.
Next post from me will be the carnivore-friendly mains from our Australia Day lunch.
