We went to the Farmer’s Market in Boulder on Saturday morning and picked up a few things that were available this early in the season.  We bought some purple potatoes, parsnips, and spinach.  We were planning on having steaks and roasted potatoes for dinner Saturday night and we didn’t have any specific plans for the produce we bought.  Thanks to teething, Jake took longer than normal to go down and while I was laying with him I came up with an idea for the produce.  We made a wilted spinach salad with roasted purple potatoes and shaved parsnips, with a maple mustard vinaigrette.

I have been making my own salad dressings thanks to the guidelines in the book How to Cook Everything.  After making Mark Bittman’s basic vinaigrettes I started to see a pattern and started experimenting with some of my own dressings.  This has been my favorite salad dressing so far! After eating it on our salads we fried some french fries the next day and ate it as a dipping sauce, which was also delicious.

For the salad:

I roasted potatoes in the oven with olive oil to coat at 450 for about 40 minutes or until crispy.  I like spinach better cooked a little bit, so I wilted it in a pan with a little bit of olive oil for a couple of minutes.  I put the spinach on the plate, topped with the roasted potatoes, and shredded parsnips, salt and pepper.

Maple Mustard Vinaigrette:

3/4 cups olive oil

1/4 cup white wine vinegar

3 tbsp maple syrup

1 tbsp spicy brown mustard

2 tbsp shallots

salt & pepper to taste

Add the white wine vinegar, maple syrup, mustard, shallots and salt and pepper to a food processor, and blend thoroughly.  Add the olive oil a little at a time and blend.  Adding the olive oil a little at a time should create an emulsion.

Enjoy!

I took Jake to a nutritionist recently to find out how we were doing with his situation and to make sure he is getting the vitamins that he needs.  She was very nice, and overall she thought we were doing pretty well considering all of our food limitations (we are currently avoiding dairy, eggs, fish, shellfish, peanuts, tree nuts, and gluten due to food allergies and celiac disease).  She thought the main area we needed to work on was getting more grains into our diet.   So, this week I’ve been experimenting with quinoa, a gluten free grain that is high in protein.

Our friends Kevin and Sam bought us a cookbook for Christmas,  Tal Ronnen’s The Conscious Cook.  This is a vegan cookbook which is great for our family because the recipes contain no dairy or eggs.  Unfortunately the meat substitute that Tal Ronnen uses throughout this book is called gardein and one of the primary ingredients is wheat gluten, which we can’t eat.  Luckily, since we do eat meat, I can use most of the recipes anyway and when he calls for gardein just use chicken.   He does have some recipes that look great for us, and I finally tried one of them last night.  I tried the quinoa, avocado, and sweet potato timbal with roasted tomatillo dressing, and had it again for lunch today.

This recipe was really tasty.  We had red quinoa which I hadn’t tried before.  I cooked it in the rice cooker, 2 cups of water per 1 cup of quinoa and it came out perfectly.  The quinoa is topped with roasted sweet potatoes, avocado, and microgreens.  I wasn’t sure exactly what Tal Ronnin meant by microgreens, but the picture along with the recipe looked like little green sprouts.  The closest thing I found at Whole Foods was mache (pronounced mosh), also known as lamb’s lettuce.  The whole salad was topped with tomatillo dressing and a few crushed tortilla chips.    This has by far been our favorite quinoa recipe and I’m excited to try some others from this cookbook.

As a side note, Jeremy and I have been craving fresh greens (I never thought I’d say that about Jeremy), and the mache was very tasty, mild and a little bit sweet.  I made a plate for myself before dinner with a little olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper, and as I was eating it and Jacob came over and wanted some.  He ate three little florets of it.  This is the first raw lettuce that he has eaten and he liked it enough to come back for more!   I was shocked.  If he keeps liking it, I want to grow some next spring, it is a cold weather crop that in most areas (not sure about here) can be planted in the fall and overwintered for fresh early greens.  Yum!