Wild Rice Salad

24Jun09

I have this problem with rice, because I ALWAYS make more than I mean to.

Always.

Then I’ve got this big bowl of it in the fridge, and I have to make more food to go with the rice, and inevitably I will need to make more rice to go with the food.

This time it was even harder, because you can’t eat savory wild rice with savory food. I wanted something to balance it out, and I remembered that you could put rice into salad.

I generally don’t go to salads as real food. I know, some of you out there think that salad is lunch, but me? I need something more. Otherwise I’ll be hungry in 20 minutes, and I’ll just end up eating again. So putting rice into my salad sounded like a good cheater way to eat salad, and use up my leftover, cooked rice.

I rummaged around in my fridge for things to go in my salad and found KALE! Amazingly I hadn’t already eaten it, and unfortunately, I had not marinated it to be in my salad yet (and I didn’t want to wait 24 hours for lunch). I remembered reading somewhere that you could roast kale in the oven; I figured I could wait 20 minutes for lunch. Right?

That turned into me throwing some really thin asian eggplants onto the roasting pan, and me being so proud of myself for eating my vegetables for lunch. The Kale came out AMAZING, and I had to stop myself from eating all the kale plain after it had been roasted. It tasted very similar to roasted seaweed and just melted in my mouth.

Since I also had leftover beans, I threw those in for good measure. I like beans in my salad– out of the can, black, pinto, whatever.

To cook wild rice, if you don’t have some already made stuff around, cook rice in a covered pot on the stove. For every cup dry raw rice, add 2 C water. Add a 1/2 bouillon cube per cup of rice. Bring to a boil and then turn down to simmer for 20-25 minutes until water has soaked into the rice and the rice is cooked. RESIST the urge to stir the rice.

Wild Rice Salad with roasted veggies (serves 1, if you’re me, and 2 if you’re you!)

• 4 leaves kale, chopped into 1 inch pieces, very bottom of stalks removed
• 5 VERY skinny eggplants (Asian variety) chopped into 1 inch pieces or 1 eggplant sliced on the bias, about 1/4 inch thick)
• 1/2 C wild rice cooked
• 1/3 C beans (pinto, black, lentil– cooked, from the can or from scratch)
• a few sprigs of cilantro (chinese parsley)
• a couple of small tomatoes, cut up (about a handful of pieces)
• salt
• olive oil
• lime or lemon juice to taste

To roast veggies

1. turn oven on to 375 degrees. Toss the kale (rub the kale with the olive oil) and eggplant in olive oil, arrange on the pan spread out. Sprinkle sea salt to taste on the top.
2. After about 10-15 minutes (watch to make sure it doesn’t burn) pick out the kale pieces off the pan and return the eggplant to the oven to cook a few minutes more after flipping them over.
3. DON’T EAT THE KALE until the salad is ready. It’s hard. I know.

Assemble the salad

1. Put all the ingredients except salt, olive oil, and lemon juice together in a bowl and toss. Add the salt, oil, and lemon juice to taste. I didn’t put very much salt in because my wild rice was already salty. I did add a tiny bit of lemon.
2. Enjoy!

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Tags: salad