Kale and peppers and rice, oh my

Today's lunch was a wonderful concoction of crunch and chew, made perfect by the sweet tang of a homemade slaw type dressing. I was out of lettuce and needed my daily raw veggies so just made my chopped salad without the lettuce greens. Carrots, orange peppers, green onion and kale all chopped and thrown in my wooden salad bowl. Half a cup of brown rice and 1T of sunflower seeds and the salad was done. Two dates soaked in ac vinegar plus 1T more of the vinegar and 1T vanilla soy milk blended up in the magic bullet made the perfect dressing. I think I'll make this again tomorrow but use walnuts instead of sunflower seeds and add in some chopped apple for a Waldorf spin. I love how there is always another way to change up a salad, plants rule! 

But what I really wanted to say is about the dates. They are the cheap by the bucket ones, not the luscious medjool dates that are just too expensive right now, and they tend to be drier and leaner and harder to chop and blend.  So I have discovered that keeping a few of them soaking in vinegar in the fridge softens them up so they will blend easier to make dressings sweet. See how creamy the dressing sits on top of the salad before I tossed it all together? It looked like regular coleslaw dressing and was just as good, but I like to think that the date has fiber and micro nutrients that the honey or sugar of a regular slaw dressing lacks. And I do use them in moderation, just one or two depending on how sweet I want the dressing.

I remember how when I first started eating for nutrition and making green smoothies in the morning these dates were my best friend, and a couple always found there way into the blender. Now that my taste buds have adjusted to the greens I rarely use them in the smoothies anymore, but they make a huge difference in the wonderfulness factor of home made salad dressings. I don't often use them together with the vanilla soy milk like I did today, but sometimes you just need that extra comfort factor, and this simple little dressing really does the trick for me.

And I'm thinking I need to soak some of the dates in the soy milk so that they are ready for me to use when I finally get around to dropping by the store for some bananas so I can use them to sweeten a green banana shake :)

I wonder how long that big bucket of dates is going to last, I'm thinking I should freeze some...