Asian-Inspired Napa Cabbage Salad

If you’re reading this page, you’ve landed on the old site.  Please visit the new location by clicking here–and don’t forget to update your readers and blogrolls!

As always, thanks for reading.  I look forward to seeing you at the shiny new Diet, Dessert and Dogs!

“Um, Mum, we are coming with you, aren’t we? Because (and sorry to have to tell you this), we actually have more fans than you do on this blog.”]  

  

A few weeks ago when I hosted a pot luck dinner for some friends from my nutrition school days, I promised on this blog to post all the recipes from the evening.  This napa cabbage salad was originally on the menu (but got usurped by Isa and Terry’s Caesar).   Well, tonight we ate the salad with/for dinner, so I’m happy to finally present the recipe here.

Napa is one of those foods that seems to straddle two different types of vegetable:  is it a lettuce (genus lactuca)?  Is it a cabbage (genus brassica)?*  What I love about it is its perma-crunch quality; even the next day, and even if you’ve thrown foresight to the winds and dressed the entire salad, the leftovers are still crisp.  In fact, my HH remarked this evening that he prefers this salad on the second day, as the flavors mature! (I’ll try that next time I make a salad of mesclun greens, too:  “Yes, that’s right Honey, it’s supposed to be limp and a bit slimy; that’s just what happens on the second day, after the flavors mature“).

After a long day of grocery shopping, errands, school work, and grumbling over the thermostat falling once again, I wasn’t feeling overly hungry (shocking, I know, but it does happen once in a while).  I’d picked up some sliced turkey for my HH, and had the napa in mind for me.  Turned out to be the perfect dinner for a six-foot one, 195-pound male carnivore and a five-foot four (and a half!), mumblemumbleunclearnumber-pound female vegetarian:  turkey sandwich and napa salad for him; a big plate of napa salad for me.  Mmm.  Can’t wait for the mature leftovers, tomorrow.

Napa Cabbage Salad

This fabulous salad recipe was given to me by my friend Barbara, who got if from someone else (exactly whom, she can no longer remember).   The two essential components, I’ve found, are the napa and the dressing; pretty much everything else can be adjusted or substituted. This is the type of salad that invites picking at it, right out of the salad bowl, once you’ve already finished what’s on your plate.

TO VIEW THE COMPLETE RECIPE, PLEASE VISIT THIS PAGE ON THE NEW DIET, DESSERT AND DOGS, BY CLICKING HERE.