Vegetable Pasta Salad Recipe

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Hi! This is Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and today we are gonna be making an Asian style vegetable noodle salad.

Now this is one of my favorite because we’re gonna use some fresh vegetables and we’re gonna get them coated in a really flavorful sauce.

And then I will put the garlic and I can hear it starts to sizzle just a little bit as soon as I put it in and that’s good but you wanna make sure that it’s not too hot otherwise the garlic will burn.

So just move it around in the oil make sure all of the garlic pieces are coated in the oil. Mines is getting a little bit hot now so I’m just gonna turn it down and I’ll also gonna lift my pot off of the burner to cool it down quicker.

Is use glass pot and they tend to once they heat up they hold the heat really really well which is nice but when you’re working with oil you wanna make sure that it doesn’t bubble too much.

Ok! So that’s looking good and in with the garlic I’m gonna throw just a little bit of chilli and you can use either the dried flakes or I have a little bit of a wet chilli oh that was too much.

Now put in as much as you are comfortable with, I’m not a big fan of hot stuff so I keep it on the low end but if you like hot things then by all means throw some more in there.

And that’s still too hot so I’m gonna just leave it off of the burner there for a sec now the other things that we’re gonna add in here now that the garlic has cooked and I’m just looking for it to get translucence. I don’t want it to brown at all, it will be just cook.

So now that that’s good, I’m gonna add some apple cider vinegar and if you’re a real Asian food buff, you can definitely use rice vinegar, it’s excellent. I like apple cider because I have a really good source for it that’s I think its local and yeah and they do it very minimally process so I like to use it because I know it’s – it’s really really good.

And we’re also gonna add some tamari and now tamari is a fermented soy sauce so you can use soy sauce as well. I like to use fermented soy products for reasons that it’s much more easily digested by humans that unfermented soy. I’ll probably get into that a little bit later.

Ok! and we’ll add some water as well, just a little and I’m gonna add some lime zest as well as some lime juice so I got my lime here and we don’t really need salt in this sauce because it has the tamari and I think I’m just gonna add a little bit more tamari and then I’m going to thicken it a little bit with some arrowroot powder.

So here’s the arrowroot powder and you can see it’s just a dried powder. I use it in place of cornstarch because I don’t like to use corn products. If you can’t find arrowroot you could just use flour.

Arrowroot has calcium in it so it’s a nice one to use for thickening because it actually has some nutrients in there.

So I’m just gonna pour a touch of water in and just like any other thickener best to stir it with some water before you add it in the actual sauce otherwise it will get clumpy and that’s no fun.

You can leave this sauce uncovered, if it evaporates a little bit that will be nice because it will be a thicker sauce. Ok and then I’ve got that on low just to simmer on it so for a little bit.

Ok next stop is to get the vegetables ready to go and I’m gonna show you a really neat technique and we’re gonna put the vegetables on a bowl. I’ve got the mushrooms ready to go here I just sliced them thinly like that then I’ve got some broccoli just chopped up that in there as well.

And I do the stalk of the broccoli as well when I was little it used to be my favorite part of the broccoli actually. Ok! Now most people don’t like raw broccoli, I do but the flavor is a lot different when it’s raw than when it’s cooked.

What we’re gonna do is actually soothe it without heating it and soothe means to jump in French and so we’re gonna make this vegetables jump and then I’m gonna crack some sea salt on there and what the sea salt does is it breaks down the cellular structure of the vegetables so that it softens and has the texture of being cook without actually cooking, without actually putting it on the heat.

And then for a bit of flavor I’m just gonna add a little bit of tamari on here. You can also do some oil or nothing at all. I’m just gonna start them flavoring with a bit of tamari.

So I’m gonna put the lid on this bowl and then I’m gonna shake it and the mushrooms especially are gonna shrink way down as they get soften by these salt. What happens is the water is drawn out of the vegetable especially when your serving someone who hasn’t have seaweed before it’s nice to chopped it up.

I made this salad for my parents one night and I didn’t tell my dad what was in it and he loved it and he said “Wow! What are these delicious green things?” and I said “they’re seaweed!”

So it was a really nice surprise that he actually likes it and then my mom asked me for some so that she can start putting it in things!

So there we go that’s chopped up nicely, check on the sauce over here. Give it a little bit of a stir. It smells delicious and then we can work on our noodles and today I’m using some brown rice noodles. They are fairly similar to the rice fermacheli that you see made of white rice but they’re actually made of brown rice so that’s nice.

You can also use other whole grain noodles like the soba noodles are really nice in this dish. If you can find those they’re the buckwheat noodles or any other type of whole grain noodle or you can even do it with rice or something like that.

So I’m just bringing some water to a boil over here for my noodles, pack a little bit of sea salt in the water for the noodles and I’m also going to toast up some cashews to put on top so this would be a good time to just pop your cashews add in them to the toaster oven because I don’t do very many at one time and if you do them on a low heat cashews roast very quickly so keep an eye on them.

It’s wilted not quite so biting when you bite into it. Ok! Toss those in as well as the tomatoes and seaweed and I also forgot to mention earlier I have some green onion as well. Gives some nice color as well as great onion flavor and then I have some beautiful sprouts here that Phil’s made so I’m gonna toss a few of those in as well.

And I just like to separate them before I mix them in otherwise they tend to stick together and you can do any combination of vegetables you like in this salad. It’s a really nice way to get in a lot of those nutritious vegetables that maybe aren’t the most popular because we’ve got this beautiful sauce all ready to go over it and bring everything together with really nice flavor. So just pour this over, toss my salad and it will be ready to serve.

All ready to eat our Asian vegetable noodle salad. If you want a real challenge, try them on with chopsticks. My noodles are pretty slippery so enjoy your dinner.