Spicy Summer Salad

This was a preferred breakfast, lunch or dinner for me when I felt the urge to eat something crunchy, cool, and raw in the heat of summer. However, I don't really like the watery, overly moistening and cooling effects of just regular leafy greens, especially ice berg lettuce, but I found these amazing 'spicy greens' from the Organic Oasis near my home that contains a mix of mustard greens, and other little pungent-bitters that appeal to me much more than the watery-crisp block of ice that normal grocery lettuce is.

To add some substance and richness to my salads, I always add pumpkin seeds (usually hand pan-toasted), or almonds, and then added some cut apple, and then a few fresh things from my garden such as tomato, basil, parsley, shiso, and then add a dressing made up of flax oil, garlic, apple cider vinegar and a little miso. I sprinkle on a little dulse too, if I'm in the mood for it. I usually have something heartier with this as well, like a cooked veg or grain, but sometimes just the freshness of a simple salad, especially with the rising sun, is all that I need to make me grin and feel centered.

Burn-Your-Mouth-Off Salad

This was made by my sister-in-law but is very blog worthy. For a wintery winter, I haven't been making a lot of green salads. So this was refreshing, but also face melting due to it's extremely high proportion of raw garlic present in the salad!!

Garlic is just amazing!! It's an antibiotic, antimicrobial, antifungus, antiparasitic, .. need I go on? It just drives stuff out of the body, typical of all pungent foods. Ever notice that when you eat a pungent food (like garlic, or horseradish) that the energy in our body seems to ascend and go outwards? This is the nature of pungent food - so if you have something that you want to drive out of you, use pungent foods!! A cold is a good example too.. a little bug is trying to hide out in our body, and raw garlic just drives it right out of the body... at first, but if you continuously do it, it can have a reversed effect. So, pungent foods in moderation are excellent. A refreshing salad with greens and chick peas are a perfect thing to accompany some hell-inspired raw garlic to drive out the baddies in your digestive tract, and depending on how well you digest the fiery fall root, it might clean out your colon too.

It has such potency for eliminating garbage from the body, that it is often too strong for people with hard-working livers. Signs of a hard-working liver might include flatulence and digestive discomfort after eating raw onions or garlic. The best solution?: don't eat them!! You can cook them, and it will help, but until your liver has done it's work and is able to relax, avoiding pungent white vegetables might be helpful. If it doesn't bother your digestion, then the white "spicy" root veggies like the aforementioned onion and garlic are nicely stimulating for the liver - creating a "get up and go" feeling, stimulating the body, blood, mind and qi.

So there you go - a whole blurb about garlic, and that's all I've got, as I have no clue how this salad was made. There were chick peas and greens and a magnificent dressing that only sister Krista can make, and so I'll leave it at that. Oh yes, carrots and cashews I can see in there as well...  AWESOME SALAD!