(Mostly) Raw Wednesday (on Tuesday)

Tonight’s dinner counts as my nod to Raw Wednesday because I will eat its leftovers for lunch tomorrow. Most of you are likely reading this on Wednesday anyway!

Alas, ‘twas not written in the stars that my dinner be delicious tonight. It’s no one’s fault in particular, least of all Gena’s and her recipe for Maple Cinnamon Vinaigrette, which is finger lickin’ good. I highly recommend it!

Because I’m deathly afraid of my mandolin as a result of a rather bloody incident not so long ago, I thought it might be a better idea to employ my poor-girl’s Slap Chop tool in the preparation of my Root Vegetable Salad. Turns out it’s a P.O.S. and made my parsnips look like chicken (surely not the desired effect when eating a raw, vegan meal). I have since donated said kitchen tool to the garbage pail.

The parsnips’ resemblance to chicken was to be the least of my grievances tonight, however. Indeed, I learned the hard way that I most definitely do not care for parsnips, raw or otherwise. I can remember putting them into a soup early this year and not being wild about it, but I had not tried parsnips before that and have not eaten them since, so I have never actually identified parsnips as a dislike until today. And boy howdy, this is the dissiest of likes, to be sure. I’ve been wearing my schtank face for a couple hours now.

In an effort to save tomorrow’s lunch, I did my best to pick the parsnips out of the remaining salad after dinner. As ghetto as my Slap Chopper is was, though, it managed to create some microscopic parsnip shards that have no doubt cross-mojinated with what are otherwise delightful ingredients: carrots, sunchokes (a vegetable I discovered I do enjoy!) and dried currants (which subbed in for the unsweetened cranberries I couldn’t find). Not to mention the killer dressing I mentioned earlier!

At this point, you might wonder why I titled this post “mostly raw.” That’s because I hid the cooked part underneath the parsnips of death Root Vegetable Salad with Maple Cinnamon Vinaigrette. Can you tell what it was?

Well, if you’ve seen Gena’s recipe for this salad, you know that it also calls for raw sweet potato. But it’s chilly outside and I always gotta go and be different, so I went ahead and baked the sweet potato part. The root veggie salad got piled on top of a whole baked Japanese sweet potato (my favorite kind!) and surrounded with a little raw kale massaged with EVOO and apple cider vinegar.

If you’ve never tried a Japanese sweet potato, get your hands on some while the gettin’s good! They have dark purple skin with very light flesh, as you can kind of see in the pictures above. They’re very sweet and creamy! Thanks to the potato and the strongly-flavored vinaigrette, dinner was far from a total loss, especially now that I know to walk a wide circle around parsnips.

What foods trigger YOUR gag reflex?