After endless weeks of homemade soup I made a wild rice salad and it was such a nice change. I always mean to use wild rice, but always forget to. And I have tried to use radicchio more, but it's often too bitter for me. This salad was a definite winner (with us adult eaters). Here's what I put in it:
- About 5 cups cooked wild rice. To cook this I boiled rice in a lot of water for about 22 minutes, strained it, returned it to the pot off the heat with the lid on, and let it sit while I get everything else ready.
- chopped green onions (about 4)
- finely chopped radicchio (about half a small head. finely chopped is key, here.)
- chopped parsley (about a 1/2 cup)
- 1-2 grated carrots
- a little bit of crumbled blue cheese (not necessary, but I like the tang.)
In the dressing was:
- 4 TBL olive oil
- 2 TBL red wine vinegar
- 1 TBL brown spicy mustard
- 1 TBL honey
- salt and pepper
Then I garnished it with my salad/soup/baking sprinkle. This is a mix of nuts and dried fruit I pre-chop in the food processor. I keep it in a jar in the fridge and add it to seemingly everything I eat. It's a bit different every time, but in this mix was:
- walnuts
- almonds
- pumpkin seeds
- dried cranberries
I add the sprinkle right before serving so the nuts stay crunchy. This salad is great cold but I like it better room-temp, even slightly warmed. The girls wouldn't even taste it. But 2 out of 3 of them did eat the curried soup I made today, so that's something.
unrelated to rice or salad:
I have been taking a modern dance class for about 2 months now and just added a modern/jazz class. This has been so amazing, humbling, and just incredibly awesome. I have been doing yoga pretty seriously for about 2+ years now and without that, I would have never been able to even sniff at these classes. But, I am totally hanging! I danced a tiny bit in high school and a tiny bit in college, but never seriously. I wasn't able to ever get started again after college, although I always missed it. I also felt like I'd never be in good enough shape to try it again without seriously injuring myself.
I had been doing yoga almost exclusively in my basement, with yogatoday.com and so being around live humans in a dance studio is so great and a huge change for me. And then there's the whole mirror thing, which I had forgotten about, there being none in my basement. There's a wide range of experience in these classes, some super experienced dancers and some very new ones. Some of the most amazing dancers are older than me, and being two months away from being 40, this is pretty dang inspiring. I am just feeling a huge wave of gratitude my body can move in this way. That's all.
