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Happy Monday foodie friends. Anyone else started the week with an early yoga session? I love getting up with the sunrise and get my body stretched and moving first thing in the week. It felt especially nice after a weekend of recovering from Friday night. Sunday was spend visiting my best friend after a week in the hospital. She had surgery and is finally back home and healing. Today we are making plans for her blog to return with some new content and I will share with you what we came up with as soon as it gets serious. After rebaking the epicly failed cheesecake brownies yesterday morning, I headed out to sort dozens of packing cases of books with some friends for a charity book sale in September, followed by the monthly meeting of our charity group. You can imagine how drenched I was when I finally arrived home around 9 pm.

So I decided to share the recipe which was scheduled for Sunday evening this morning with you instead. It is my entry for Healthy Cooking Camps #SaladFest2013 and contains beautiful fresh summer ingredients to bring out all the sunshine flavors.

Tempeh Grilled Peach Salad

with Blackberry Cilantro Pesto

grilled peach salad

makes one huge lunch salad

  • 4-5 slices of tempeh
  • 1/2 peach, sliced
  • 1 tsp coconut oil
  • green salad leaves (arugula and spinach are recommended)
  • 1 tbsp cashews
  • dash of sea salt

pesto ingredients

for the pesto:

  • 1/4 cup blackberries
  • handful of cilantro leaves
  • 1 tsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp balsamic vinegar
  • dash of sea salt

preperations

Heat a pan with coconut oil. Place your tempeh and peach slices in the heated oil. Give them a quick stir to coat evenly. Put a lid on top and let them fry on medium heat, while turning from time to time. Remove the cilantro stalks and combine all of the pesto ingredients in a blender. Mix for 30 seconds and use as it is, or add water to your liking to achieve a more dressing-like consistency. You could also use mortar and pestle to make this.

tempeh salad

Mix the green leaves, cashews and sea salt in a bowl. You could also add some fresh cilantro leaves to enhance the flavor. Top them off with your fried peach and tempeh slices. Pour the blackberry cilantro pesto on top and serve.

grilled peach tempeh salad

I hope you enjoy my Salad Fest 2013 entry. I do like this recipe especially since it is so versatile. I had variations of this dish for lunch several times last week and brought another one to the office today. I use butternut squash instead of the peach if I crave a more savory salad. Or fresh berries, which are growing all over the neighborhood at the moment. I also hand picked the blackberries which I used for the pesto. Cilantro is my favorite herb, thus this pesto quickly became my favorite salad dressing. I also love to use it with grain-based salads like rice or quinoa bowls.

A quick shout out to my best friend who is holding her feet still at home while giving her body time to recovery. You make my Monday marvelous, lovely!

P.S. You can follow me on Instagram now if you like. I got my brothers old mobile phone (isn’t he a sweetheart?) with a better cam and android system – instagram, twitter, tumblr on my phone… this will be my downfall for sure.