I love this time of year when the weather is slightly warm during the day and cool at night. It lets me know summer is coming and our meals will be filled with grilled foods and salads. All kinds of salads!!! I am fortunate that everyone in the family likes eating salads so it makes it easy for me to come up with a variety of warm or cold salads that go well with grilled chicken, fish and barbeque.
My latest salad experiment is a Wild Rice Salad. I liked this one because I could serve it either chilled, slightly warmed or at room temperature. Rice isn’t heavy but can be very filling so it goes well with most entrees. If you don’t want to eat a lot of food but you want to feel like you have eaten a meal, put a little more rice on your plate. You will feel quite full and may not even want dessert. I know, who am I kidding. Everyone wants dessert no matter what. At least you may want a little less dessert.
Whenever I make salads I try to combine both veggies and fruits. Golden raisins are one of the staples in my pantry as well as cranberries. Most of the leafy salads I make include fruits, nuts and cheese. I wasn’t too confident that including all three of those ingredients would work in a Wild Rice Salad so I decided to stick with fruit and nuts. The combination of wild rice, oranges and pecans was perfect. Savory, sweet and crunchy. Not bad if I do say so myself. One more wonderful salad recipe added to my long list of summertime dishes.
Wild Rice Salad
Ingredients:
1 box wild rice (approximately 2 cups cooked)
1 10 oz can mandarin oranges drained
¼ cup golden raisins
¼ cup cranberries
¼ cup celery small dice
¼ cup vinaigrette
1 tsp lemon zest
½ tsp black pepper
pinch of salt
Prepare wild rice according to package. Let rice cool then place in a large bowl. Add remaining ingredients and mix well. Serve chilled or at room temperature.
