Vegan Salad Recipe With Orange Balsamic Vinaigrette

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we are making a beet mushroom and almond salad with an orange vinaigrette. Hmm. I’m excited!

Now I’m doing this with some cooked beets tonight because its winter. I do also do the same salad in the summer with raw beets. So stick tune for the summer episodes.

So the first thing I started with was the mushrooms and what I did was sliced up the mushrooms really thin, sprinkle some salt and some balsamic vinegar on them. I put them in this plastic container and I’ve lost my lid but I put the lid on, shake it up and let them sit.

They’ve been sitting for about an hour and you can see that they’re really nice and soft and you can also see here that the vinegar has come back out of them. So when you first toast them, they’re going to suck the vinegar right up when they fully marinated they’re gonna release it, their juice as well as the vinegar. And that’s when they get this nice, soft look.

The beets I put it in a pot and I put just a bit of water so I wasn’t boiling them technically, I was kind of steaming them. So the water is at the bottom of the pot and it’s boiling so the bottom of the beet I guess is boiling but the rest of it is actually steaming.

And then I peel it, so I did them whole without the greens and then I peel it and I’m gonna cut them into chunks. So what I’m actually gonna do is quarter this beet first and then cut it into some nice large chunks. I like to have a good chunk of beet in my mouth but not too big that you can’t fit in your mouth coz that never is fun.

You can see how these beets have stained my board and they stained my hands a little bit. You maybe can’t tell. I rinse them off but they’re still pretty red.

When a food has such a deep color like this it must have some pretty awesome nutrition going on and if you look at Chinese medicine they say that beets stimulates blood circulation and the flow of the liver and blood of course is red and the liver purifies the blood.

So if you think of beets like blood it pretty much makes sense maybe not so appetizing maybe I should think of a different story for that.

But anyway! Ok! So I’ve got my lettuce chopped up or torn up into a salad bowl here and I like to use the bowl for my salad later after I’ve dried my lettuce to avoid multiple dishes so I’ve got the beets chopped up and I’m gonna add it in my salad here and then the mushrooms and I’ll show you close up here so you can see how nice and soft these are.

And how much vinegar and mushroom juice has leach out of here. I like this juice so I’m just gonna add right to the salad. It’s mostly balsamic vinegar so it’s gonna go nicely with the dressing which I put together while the beets were cooking and while the mushrooms are marinating.

And I’ve got it in this jar here, nice way to mix up your salad dressing is to shake it in a jar and what I’ve put in here is the zest of an orange. So you zest your orange before you get the juice out otherwise you won’t be able to zest it and I’ve used a zester.

If you don’t have one of these guys, they’re pretty cheap but if you don’t have one you can use a grater just be sure you don’t grate into the white part of the orange that’s called the pith and its bitter. So you don’t really want that!

Alright! See our salad here, so we’ve got beets, we’ve got mushrooms and we’re gonna add some green onion that I have chopped up back here just a little bit. I’m a big fun of green onion. If you’re not, leave that out. No worries!

Ok! I think we’re pretty much ready to go. Let’s just give this dressing one last shake, pour a bit over here and this dressing made a lot because I use the whole juice of the orange and what I did was I use equal parts orange juice, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Makes a really nice, light, citrusy dressing!

Ok! So I just toss these together and that’s pretty much it. We’re ready to serve. I’ve got some toasted almonds on the side that I’m gonna sprinkle on top here just to give it a bit more imp.

There we go! A beautiful beet mushroom salad and I’ve got some toasted almonds that I’ve chopped up, just sprinkle those on top. Makes it absolutely fantastic meal! People don’t always think of putting beets in a salad but especially with the orange vinaigrette so lovely and so filling.

You could have it on the side of a grain meal, that’s also nice like a rice stir fry something like that but Phil and I love to have this as a meal on its own so delicious and sometimes if you’re lucky it will stain your tongue bright red. Enjoy!