FOOD | HEALTH | SPIRITUALITY

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The Sacred & Delicious Food List

The Sacred & Delicious Food List is an addendum to the cookbook, Sacred & Delicious. Author Lisa Mitchell decided to distribute this comprehensive list of the foods through her website so that she would be able to update it more easily. These are foods found in most modern kitchens. The list organizes the foods into categories to reflect how they fit in your diet from an Ayurvedic perspective.


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Fresh Salad Dressings Perk Up an Ordinary Salad

Photo by Jacqueline Shraddha Matchett

It’s official: summer is here and it’s time to welcome the season with all kinds of salads that sparkle with flavor—once they get a delicious topping like this Easy Avocado Salad Dressing! Yes, there are many commercial salad dressings that will do, but there’s nothing quite like the taste of a fresh dressing you whip up yourself just before eating.

Any simple green salad (like the salad with cucumbers, carrots, and sunflower seeds pictured here) will shine with this garlicky sauce. What about dressing up an ordinary potato salad? Or try this on a black rice salad? Bean salads transform from ho-hum to woo-hoo with this dash of delicious!

As many of my readers will know, traditional Ayurvedic practitioners generally do not recommend raw-food salads and caution against eating them daily, since raw foods take considerably longer to digest than cooked foods. Because raw-food salads are usually light and cooling, they tend to increase vata and kapha. Nonetheless, we Americans do love our salads, especially during the hot days of summer. If you have strong digestion, you may tolerate the raw-food standard. In any case, the garlic in this dressing will help you to better digest those raw veggies, and the avocado will help pacify vata.

At home, I save salads for late spring through the summer and early autumn when it’s still warm in the Carolinas. I serve salad greens with seeded raw cucumbers, as they are easier to digest when seeded, and they are so cooling on these hot summer days. Then I may add avocado and/or roasted vegetables and some kind of seeds or nuts.

Not interested in salads? This dressing will also perk up many an ordinary side dish. Grilled summer squash and asparagus or any steamed vegetable will be so much more flavorful when drizzled with this tangy dressing.

Enjoy this Easy Avocado Salad Dressing in 10 minutes or less.

Lisa J. Mitchell

PS Looking for more quick salad dressing recipes? See pages 210-212 in your copy of Sacred & Delicious!

Print

EASY AVOCADO SALAD DRESSING

Preparation time: 10 minutes or less
Makes about 1½ cups

1 medium Haas Avocado, ripe
1 cup water
1 tablespoon avocado or olive oil
Juice of 1 lime (2 to 3 tablespoons)
½ teaspoon salt
¼ to ½ cup cilantro, leaves and stems
1 to 2 cloves garlic

1. Peel the avocado and cut into 6 or 8 slices. Soak the cilantro to remove any soil, and strain or shake off the water.

2. Purée all of the ingredients in a blender or place the ingredients in a 4-cup measuring cup and purée with an immersion blender. Taste, and adjust salt, lime, cilantro, and garlic, as you wish.

Cut garlic in half when experiencing pitta problems.

Avoid avocado and oily dressing when you have a cold, cough, or congestion.

2 Responses

  1. Katie says:
    June 25, 2021 at 6:01 pm

    Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and experience. I’m pretty new to Ayurvedic eating and really appreciate all you share.

    • Lisa says:
      June 26, 2021 at 12:00 pm

      Thanks for your comment, Katie! If you’ve been reading the blog for awhile or have a copy of Sacred & Delicious, it becomes more clear that this is a modern and very American approach to Ayurvedic cooking! If I’m not feeling well, I stick to the traditional Indian dishes of whole mung (green beans) and split mung dal with easy to digest vegetables such as squashes, asparagus, green beans, sweet potatoes. Black beans are definitely harder to digest. I save all the hard bean dishes for once or twice a month, not for daily or even weekly meals. I pamper my digestion with a lot of mung soup and mung burgers and then a wider variety of vegetables…and salads with mostly roasted veggies in summertime.