Sesame Almond Cabbage Salad

Glad to have met some great people along the way here in Cincinnati. Got this recipe from a Cincy acquaintance after a lovely Sunday lunch. This salad is nice and light, and the almonds & sesame seeds provide a nice crunch & texture!

For the salad:

1/2 medium green cabbage, thinly shredded

5-7 green onions thinly chopped

bunch parsley, thinly chopped (about 1/2 cup)

1/2 cup slivered/sliced almonds

3 Tbsp. sesame seeds

While shredding & chopping the first 3 ingredients (or before), set your oven to 350F and toast the almonds & sesame seeds for about 8-10min until golden brown. Allow them to fully cool before putting them in the salad, the heat will cause more juices to release from the cabbage.

For the dressing:

2 Tbsp. sugar

1/2 tsp. both salt & pepper

2 Tbsp. chicken broth base powder

3 Tbsp lemon juice

1/3cup either olive oil or flax oil

I did not have the chicken broth base powder so I added an all-purpose salt seasoning mix, and I split the lemon juice requirements with white balsamic vinegar and it still tasted delicious!! Those were my deviations from the original recipe.

Mix it all together and enjoy. 

This recipe produces a pretty big portion, about 6-8 servings. It is good the next day but just know that it will be soggier and not as crunchy!

Chipotle's Barbacoa AT HOME!

I always like the challenge of make a copy-cat recipe from a restaurant and seeing how closely the finished products compares. I wasn't planning on making this dinner idea a blog post but once I tasted the beef as I was shredding it, I could not resist. So that will explain why I don't have my normal picture of all the ingredients. Just snapped a few pics of the final thing. My husband & I love Chipotle and this recipe was absolutely fabulous! I used Eye of Round Beef Roast, and the chipotle peppers in adobo sauce gives it the nice smokey flavor (you can find these peppers in the Mexican section of your grocery store, they are canned). Since you only use 3-4 peppers, depending on the size of you meat, I froze the rest in a small tupperware. What I did so that it would be convienent for next time, I layered parchment paper between 3-4 peppers so that I would not have to defrost all the peppers, just the portion I needed. What I like about this food.com version of the recipe was that I was able to tweak the serving size until it showed the weight of the size of meat I bought, so that I would make the appropriate amount of marinade. They call for a piece of meat that is too big for my family, and since I had a 2.5lb piece, I tweaked it to 4 srvgs and it worked perfectly. It also works the other way if you have a larger piece or making this for a party!
So here is the link & enjoy:
http://www.food.com/recipe/chipotles-barbacoa-copycat-recipe-472445?scaleto=6&mode=null&st=true

I also had a side of white rice splashed with lime juice, cilantro and corn.
If you like Chipotle's rice here is the copycat recipe for it:
             http://restaurant.food.com/recipe/chipotle-copycat-lime-rice-recipe-147335