Great grain salads - Healthy eating advice from Herbalife
Like 0 Dislike 0 Published on 10 May 2013
I'm Susan Bowerman, Herbalife nutritionist. If you're trying to get more whole grains into your diet but you're not sure how, today's video is for you.
If you're not used to eating whole grains, it's sometimes a bit of a challenge trying to figure out how to work them into your diet. Switching from white bread to whole wheat, or from white rice to brown is pretty easy, but beyond that, many people seem a little baffled by whole grains. And, even though you can just cook them up and serve them as a side dish, they're a little more interesting when you turn them into something more -- like a salad.
There are a couple of good reasons to try a grain salad. For one thing, if you are cooking up some whole grains for dinner, you can easily cook up extra, pop it in the refrigerator to cool, and you've got the start of a quick and hearty salad the next day. The other thing is that although whole grains are healthy, the calories can add up pretty quickly if you eat them on their own. But if you mix your grains with a lot of low calorie veggies, it's not only healthier and tastier - the calories per serving can go down dramatically, too.
Here's how to do it. You might want to pick a grain you haven't had before and cook up a batch. Here I've got a few unusual ones. There's quinoa, which is technically a seed, and buckwheat -- which is also a seed and, despite its name, isn't related to wheat, and I've also got some wild rice which is a grain. And, by the way, they're all gluten-free.
What you add to your grain salad is really up to your imagination. I like to add a variety of colors and flavors to mine. For my wild rice salad, I like to include tomato in my grain salads because it adds a lot of moisture, which means you can get by with a lot less dressing. I'm going to add some diced carrots, this is going to be so colorful by the time I'm done. Some parsley and some cucumber. And we are just going to mix that all together and it's going to look like we have more veggies than grains. And the other thing I am going to stir in here is some parsley just to give it some color. And you'll see that when I mix it up we have a beautiful salad with lots of color. What the vegetables are doing is they are moistening up the grains in our salad. Since the veggies add so much flavor, you can dress these salads really lightly. A tiny bit of olive oil and lemon, some salt and fresh pepper, you really don't need to add much because the vegetables are going to flavor up this salad. And this is just delicious and you're done.
You can get more assertive with your flavors if you want to -- you can add stronger herbs like basil or cilantro, change up the dressing with citrus juice or vinegar or you can add some garlic or mustard. Curried grains are great.
Here, I've seasoned my quinoa with curry powder, rice vinegar and salt and pepper, and I added celery, green onions, carrots and dried cranberries which give it a beautiful color. Red grapes would be good in this one, too, or a handful of raisins.
The other nice thing about these grain salads is that since you've already got your whole grain and veggies, all you need to add is some protein to make this a quick, easy one-dish meal. Some grilled tofu, chicken, fish, or shrimp would be great on top.
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