Wonderful Wombok Salad

A fresh Chinese cabbage, crunchy ingredients and a peanut-y dressing make a wonderful, fresh and light salad. Perfect for warm Spring days!

Fresh ingredients for a delicious, crunchy salad.

Wombok forms the leafy basis of this delicious salad. It is an oval-shaped Chinese cabbage with distinctive lighter-green, crinkly leaves. Finely shredded and then tossed with other fresh, raw veggies like capsicum, spring onion, carrot and celery, sprinkled with toasty slivered almonds and sesame seeds and finished off with a generous drizzle of a tangy, peanut butter dressing. So good...  and so good for you!  (Please note that it's not suitable for those with nut allergies.)

As soon as I spotted the wombok, grown just to the North of our city on the Sunshine Coast, and available in our little local organic market shop, I knew I could put it together with the  crunchy celery from my garden to make this salad.  Here's how it came together in my kitchen:

Wash, dry and finely shred leaves of the wombok. 

Chop spring onion, celery, capsicum and grate carrot. 

Toss prepared salad vegetables together in a bowl.

Sprinkle with toasted slivered almonds & sesame seeds.

(Toss again to incorporate throughout the salad.)

This is a very versatile salad. I don't work off exact quantities for the salad because you can add as much as you like of the extra veggies to the shredded wombok. It really doesn't matter if you use one carrot or two, half a capsicum or a whole one.  You could add some chunks of de-seeded cucumber, some fresh bean sprouts or some fried Chinese noodles for extra crunch.  Shredded chicken is nice if you want to add a meat to the salad.

There are many different kinds of dressings that you could use with this salad. I chose to make this peanut-buttery dressing that I found over at the Laughing Spatula website.  I whisked up the dressing separately and then drizzled it over the top of each serve rather than adding it to the salad bowl. Leftovers of both went separately into the fridge ready for lunch the next day. (No soggy salad that way!)

This is a really lovely salad. It's fresh, it's crunchy and it's totally delicious. Enjoy!

Meg

Stitching in Zinnia Colours

Last year, I grew a lovely drift of bright and happy zinnias. Their pink, yellow, orange, red and cream petals coloured-in the garden. When trying to decide on a little stitching project, after feeling inspired by several embroidery books from the library, I kept coming back to the zinnia-coloured threads in my stash and so I began ...

Little zinnias on linen.

Simple little flowers, made with tiny french knots for centres and what I think of as a not-so-neat satin stitch for petals, are beginning to scatter themselves across the linen inside my embroidery hoop. Randomly placed, repeated as many times as I wish, tiny and some even a little smaller than that, imperfect and so soothing to stitch.

Brightly coloured & freely-formed flowers.

I'm not sure what I'll do with this little square of embroidered linen once it's done. Perhaps another small project bag, a pocket on a simple skirt, a central and flower-y panel on a reusable tote bag ... what would you suggest?

Last year's colourful zinnias.

Whatever it becomes, it was lovely to be reminded of the zinnias I grew in last Summer's garden. Stitching happiness!

Have a lovely weekend.

Meg

On the Fringe

A short drive out to visit friends last week had us exploring the semi-rural western fringe of our city. Depending on rainfall patterns, this area is either lush and green or it's dry and myriad shades of brown among the gum trees. With hot daytime temperatures and no significant rain for a long while now, the landscape seemed hazy and parched. The grass crunched and crackled under our feet and the dust billowed up behind the car as we bounced our way down the rocky and rutted driveway to our destination. This is what we found just fifteen minutes from home ...

A hand-painted sign looking after the local wildlife.

(No sign of these spiky creatures though!)

 Rusting farm machinery by the roadside.

Long local driveways.

A silvery log in a paddock.

Low water levels in property dams.

Gorgeous grevilleas in flower.

 Chooks scratching for tasty morsels and ...

... geese, cockatoos, kookaburras and rosellas.

Busy honeybees at the entrance to a hive!

The distinctive seed cones on native Banksia.

The hazy view from the top of a hilly road.

As we were leaving for home, the distinctive call of sulphur-crested cockatoos rang out over the hills and paddocks. A late afternoon farewell.

Meg