Codexica

So I just made… EGGPLANT AND BROWN RICE SALAD!

I’m so excited to eat this for lunch tomorrow. It is delicious (yes, of course I sneaked a bite when I was putting it away in the fridge…)! It was inspired by Umami Girl’s recipe, which can be found here.

Anyway, here’s what I did:

Ingredients:

• 1 eggplant
• Brown rice to equal ~2 cups cooked (I actually just used one of those 10 minute boil-in-the-bag things by Success… )
• 2 tablespoons minced jarred garlic (packed in water)
• 3-4 tablespoons lemon juice
• 4 ounces of a green olive/kalamata olive/feta cheese blend from the olive bar at my local supermarket’s deli
• 1/4 TVP
• 1 tsp zesty Italian salad dressing
• Herbs from my spice rack picked out at random… I used Italian season, basil, and marjoram. Use whatever looks good to you! :-)

What you do with the ingredients:

• Dice the eggplant. Spritz a baking sheet with cooking spray, and roast the eggplant at 350 F until done to your liking (I lost track of time and was in a different room and totally burned mine, so I picked out the unsalvageable bits and threw them away… it left me with about 3/4 of the original eggplant to use in my salad, I’d estimate).
• Boil your brown rice. Since mine was nicely in a bag and everything, I rinsed it under cold water after it finished cooking but before de-bagging it so I wouldn’t have to wait for it to cool. Otherwise, you should probably wait for it to cool.
• Throw the brown rice, the eggplant, your olives and feta, 3 T of the lemon juice, the garlic, and whatever herbs you’re using into a bowl together. Mix.
• At this point, I decided that I probably wanted to up the protein and fiber counts by adding in some TVP, so I took 1T lemon juice, 1t Italian dressing, and filled the rest of the 1/4 cup of liquid needed up with water, heated that, and used it to reconstitute the TVP. I added the extra lemon and a dash of Italian dressing because I wanted to make sure the TVP would be flavorful like the rest of the salad.
• Add the TVP, mix it all up, and enjoy!

The nutritionals for the way I made it are (assuming the recipe serves 4):

266 calories, 28g carbs, 15g fat, 7g protein, 5g fiber, and 3g sugar.

Mine has a lot of fat because of the olives and feta cheese… you can easily lower this by using fewer olives (but I LOVE olives!), using canned olives (which are typically packed in a salt-water brine, not an olive oil brine), and using fat-free feta cheese instead of full-fat feta cheese.