Side Dish

Lunch, Main Dish, Recipes, Side Dish

Thai Carrot Salad with Curry Spiced Cashews

thai carrot salad | confections of a dietitian

Thanksgiving is next week and I’m giving you… a salad! I know, typical dietitian move, but you have to hear me out about this salad. For me, and I would assume for many of you, it is challenging to keep my diet in moderation this time of year with all of the delicious sweets and traditional, yet heavy, holiday dishes. For balance, I usually resort to eating salads each day for either lunch or dinner. After awhile though, green lettuce salads start to get a little mundane. Sure, there are lots of awesome salad recipes out there, but I can only buy so many ingredients for one person before it starts getting a little ridiculous. This Thai carrot salad is the perfect answer. I always have these ingredients in my pantry and it changes the salad pattern up just enough to keep things interesting! Another bonus is that carrots are always available, so you can make this salad year round and not have to worry about finding everything that you need.

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Appetizer, Lunch, Main Dish, Recipes, Side Dish

Japanese Pumpkin and Ricotta Toasts

confections of a dietitian | japanese pumpkin and ricotta toasts

Japan loves Halloween. It’s a fairly new holiday here, as it used to only be celebrated by foreigners before it became popular among the locals too. Every store and restaurant has displays and decorations (some will even give a discount if you show up in costume this weekend) and all of the typical treats and candies have special Halloween packaging. There are costume contests and other Halloween type events at the local malls and trick or treating on base for all of the military and local Japanese kids. Since pumpkins are so iconic in America surrounding Halloween, Japan has also adopted this specialty flavor for the month of October. As exciting as this may sound, it’s not the typical pumpkin spice flavor that Americans know and love. In Japan, their “pumpkin” is what we know as kabocha squash. You can imagine how this has become very disorienting when buying, for example, pumpkin Kit-Kats and having them taste like raw squash, and not like the warm fall flavors that we are accustomed to. (My apologies again to my siblings and everyone else that I convinced to try the “pumpkin” Kit-Kats I brought back with me.) The pumpkin ice cream that I found was better, probably because it was made by Häagen Dazs, but the best thing I’ve had was the pumpkin ramen from one of our favorite ramen shops. To summarize my taste testing experiences so far, pumpkin specials in Japan are much better when they are savory rather than sweet.

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Recipes, Side Dish

Roasted Broccoli

roasted broccoli | confections of a dietitian

As a dietitian, I am always trying to find ways to get people to eat more vegetables. The problem is, usually these people do not eat a lot of vegetables because they do not like the taste. Depending on how vegetables are cooked, I’d have to agree with them. Mushy, overcooked carrots, green beans or broccoli are not high on my list of delicious foods. This post isn’t going to tell you how to make every vegetable taste good, but I am going to share how one vegetable went from “meh” to “I want to eat this every day” in our house. That vegetable is broccoli.

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