Grilled Thai Cabbage Salad with Almond Chile Sauce

I do my best to make good choices about the food I buy. I don’t eat a lot of meat, and I don’t eat any red meat. But, I can always try to do better. The new book Living the Farm Sanctuary Life is full of inspiration for eating better, taking better care of the planet, and paying more attention to how animals are raised. I received a review copy. It’s doesn’t beat you up about how you choose to eat. It just tells the story of Farm Sanctuary and how they’ve rescued animals and inspired a lot of people to stop eating animal products. There are charming anecdotes about the animals that have been saved, nursed back to health, and gone on to delight everyone who gets to know them. There are reminders about the horrible conditions at factory farms and suggestions for making small changes that will add up. I started thinking about how my consumption of espresso drinks with milk has increased over recent years. In the past, I drank tea more often. I decided it’s time to switch back to more tea and less dairy and to make sure I’m visiting coffee bars that use milk from good sources when I do need a cappuccino fix. I’m also thinking that fewer turkey sandwiches and more sandwiches filled with vegetables would be a good change. Following the stories about the animals and the farm and tips for healthy eating, there are recipes for Breakfast, Salad, Handheld Meals, Soups, Appetizers and Sides, Entrees, and Desserts. And, they’re all free of animal products. Some dishes I want to try include: the Tacos with Salted Grilled Plantains, Salsa Verde, and Pepitas on homemade tortillas; the Spring Vegetable Cioppino; and the Savory Wild Mushroom Crepes with Roasted Fingerling Breakfast Potatoes made with chickpea flour in the crepes. I jumped right into the Grilled Thai Cabbage Salad before our local cabbage disappears for the summer. 

The salad itself is an easy mix of a few vegetables and lots of herbs, and the grilled cabbage adds a lot of flavor. But, the real star here is the sauce. I want to keep a bowl of it handy for dipping all kinds of vegetables or grilled tofu. It’s made in a blender by combining almond butter, lemon juice, rice wine vinegar, chopped fresh ginger and garlic, a chopped serrano chile, some tamari, and a little water and pureeing until smooth. You can add more water as it purees to get the consistency you’d like. Meanwhile, the cabbage was cut into big wedges and drizzled with oil. I grilled the wedges inside on a grill pan, but the flavor of grill smoke would have been even better for it. The wedges were only grilled for a few minutes per side to get some marks and to allow the cabbage to just begin to take on some tenderness. After removing the cabbage from the grill pan and letting it cool, it was chopped into chunks. The cabbage was tossed with chopped mint, basil, cilantro, and bean sprouts and green onions. It was served with the sauce drizzled over top. 

I always love a peanut sauce, so I suspected I was going to enjoy this almond sauce on the salad. In fact, I might have liked it more than any variation on peanut sauce I’ve made before. The lemon juice was the magic ingredient, and the serrano gave it just enough heat. The salad was fresh and full of flavor from the herbs, and the charred cabbage added an earthy note. With dishes like this, eating all plant-based food is easy. 

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Animal Cookies

Yes, I do a lot of baking. I go through quite a lot of all-purpose flour and granulated sugar, but I also love getting to experiment with various whole grains and less refined, natural sweeteners. Now, there’s a book devoted entirely to that latter category of baking. It’s Honey and Oats by Jennifer Katzinger, and I received a review copy. Every recipe in the book, which covers Scones and Muffins, Cookies and Bars, Quick Breads, Yeasted Breads and Crackers, Pies and Tarts, and Cakes and Frostings, is made with whole grain flours and sweeteners like honey, maple syrup, coconut palm sugar, and sucanat. I learned that minimally processed honey contains antioxidants and beneficial microbial properties; maple syrup contains manganese and zinc along with other trace minerals and vitamins; coconut palm sugar contains B vitamins and amino acids with minerals and enzymes that slow its absorption into the bloodstream making it lower on the glycemic index than other sweeteners; and sucanat, the least refined sweetener made from cane sugar, has iron, calcium, potassium, and vitamin B6 that remain after its minimal processing. I want to start using more of these in place of refined, granulated sugar, and this book makes it easy. As soon as our local, fresh figs appear this year, I’ll be turning back to the Fresh Fig Almond Scones made with buckwheat and spelt flours and honey. I also have the page marked for the Date Bars made with spelt and einkorn flours, oats, and coconut palm sugar. The Chocolate Pistachio Bars are also calling out to me, and there are instructions in the book for making Maple-Sweetened Chocolate to use on them. The Triple-Layer Chocolate Sour Cream Cake is made with barley flour and is sweetened with maple syrup, and the Honey Spice Cake with Cream Cheese Honey Frosting is a beauty as it’s shown with five layers but can also be baked in a Bundt pan. 

I have a collection of little, animal shaped cutters that had been waiting patiently for far too long to be used, so I jumped at the chance to make the Animal Cookies. The dough is surprisingly easy to work with, and it doesn’t spread much while baking. It’s made with canola oil, maple syrup, almond butter, and vanilla extract. After mixing those ingredients, whole wheat pastry flour, cinnamon, sea salt, and baking soda were added. The dough was easily rolled on a floured surface and cut into shapes. I tested baking some of the cut cookies immediately and chilling some before baking. It was barely noticeable that the cookies that were baked immediately had spread just slightly more than those that were chilled first. They bake into crunchy, delightful, little cookies that keep well for several days. They’re sweet and nutty from the maple syrup and almond butter, and right away, they became an addictive snack. 

There’s an art to eating animal cookies. You can start by biting off the head and work your way around the cookie to the legs. With these, we had a little fun trying guess what each animal was supposed to be. The cutters I have are cute, but a few of the shapes are a little difficult to identify. There are fish and ducks and what I think are bunnies. One shape I interpreted as a pony and another as a puppy. The kitty cat shape didn’t work so well as it baked into a blob, but the fox shape was fun since you can bite off the tail. Mostly, these cookies were a delight because of the flavors of maple, cinnamon, and almond butter. And, now I can’t wait to try more recipes with whole grains and natural sweeteners. 

Animal Cookies 
Recipe reprinted from Honey and Oats with permission from Sasquatch Books. 

These cookies are rich sans the butter. The dough is soft, pliable, and easy for kids to roll out. Be sure to have enough flour on your work surface so you can lift the cut-out cookies.

1/2 cup canola oil
1⁄2 cup plus 1 tablespoon maple syrup 
1⁄4 cup nut butter (choose your favorite) 
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract 
2 cups whole-wheat pastry flour, or 1 cup einkorn flour and 1 cup whole- wheat pastry 
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. 

In a large bowl using an electric mixer, or in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the oil, maple syrup, nut butter, and vanilla until smooth and creamy, about 3 minutes, scraping down the sides of the bowl occasionally. In a separate medium bowl, mix the flour, cinnamon, salt, and baking soda. With the mixer on the lowest speed, slowly add the dry ingredients. Mix until a soft dough is formed. 

Roll the dough out on a well-floured work surface to a1⁄4-inch thickness. Using animal-shaped cutters, cut cookies and place them on the prepared baking sheets. Bake until the cookies are golden and firm to touch, 12 to 15 minutes, depending on the size of your cookies. Cool the cookies on the sheets on wire racks for 5 minutes, then transfer to racks or flattened paper bags to cool completely. 

I am a member of the Amazon Affiliate Program.

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