Healing from the Holidays: Perfect Detox Salad
Late last night, 14+ hours of traveling and 7 flight changes later, I finally made it home to Austin after almost a month off visiting family and friends back in Boston (and lining up some amazing opportunities, but more on that later). Between the holidays, flu season, coping with the polar vortex, and airports being the least hospitable place for someone with food allergies, I feel like garbage.
So, while catching up on email, unpacking, mixing cocktails of DayQuil and Airborne and napping intermittently, I turned to my new favorite salad from What’s Gaby Cooking for fuel. Since pinning the recipe almost 5 weeks ago, I’ve now made this salad more than a dozen times — including making it for family on Christmas Eve as a foil to our favorite butter-and-cheese laden dishes (Dauphinoise potatoes!) and then again on the first day of 2014 as a salve for (too much) celebrating with friends. Not only is it delicious, refreshing, and filling, but Brussels sprouts were recently ranked higher than every single leafy green save kale on Dr. Fuhrman’s top superfoods score chart. I swear I can feel the chlorophyll fixing me and my cells from the inside out.
While, in the words of Emily Ansara Baines, author of The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook (whom I recently interviewed), “Just like the British aristocracy, Brussels sprouts are seen as a snooty — and hard to like — vegetable,” I prefer to think of them as the perfect affordable winter green. And healthy food is always cheaper than trips to the doctor!
Head over to What’s Gaby Cooking for the full recipe for shredded Brussels sprouts salad (including a video!), and take my advice:
Toss the green vegetables (Brussels sprouts and avocado) and the cranberries in the lemon & olive oil vinaigrette and let sit for up to an hour before adding the cheese and serving, which sort of “cooks” the Brussels sprouts in the citrus and removes some of their bitterness, keeps the avocado from browning, and reconstitutes the dried cranberries a bit and makes them plump and even more delicious.
Photo: Courtesy of What’s Gaby Cooking, all rights reserved.