Spring Spiralized Zoodle Salad

Hey friends, this has to be one of the more kid friendly recipes I have made so far in learning about Holistic Nutrition. The Raw Spiralized Zoodle salad.

Let me tell you why it’s kid friendly, because they get to choose what goes in it. Imagine this, your child doesn’t like vegetables and won’t for the life of you eat anything rainbow in color. Insert a spiralizer and the attention has peaked.

This is our spiralizer, it’s attached to a cutting device we got my mother in law one year for Christmas that has gotten a fair amount of love other than the spiralizer part, until we learned this recipe that is. Now as you can see those are little hands, my 11 year old instantly perked her ears the moment I said I was going to try this out. She was the first to say “I’ll do it!” when I explained I had to make a salad for my assignment at school using the spiralizer tool and Seasonal, Organic, Local, and Unprocessed foods.

The fun part is both the using of the machine and picking out the ingredients. So after much thought we went to the store to try and find what was in season (it was a Monday so no farmers markets were open that we could find online) and local, these were two of the three required pieces for my dish. Thankfully our Kroger stores have local produce so we were able to pick out cucumbers, carrots and some cauliflower for our very simple salad. The carrots and the cucumber (as seen in the photo above) were able to be spiralized but in doing so we learned somethings.

1) You need firm vegetables or it will be hard to do. They tend to squish and I don’t know if it was our learning curve but the carrot was much easier to do than the cucumber. Zucchini is one of the top vegetables when looking up spiralizer recipes, so I think our cucumbers were just to soft and not the wrong type of vegetable since cucumbers and zucchini are close in a lot of ways other than taste.

2) You need to pat dry before adding to your bowl. High water content of the vegetables of course will add moisture, but this was something I wasn’t aware of so after we added in our dressing it was very wet and mushy but also unfortunately didn’t last long in the fridge for leftovers. So pat dry all your components before adding them together and adding in your dressing of choice.

3) Have fun with the ingredients. By adding in foods your kids pick or even your picky partner this recipe not only is fun but delicious. We didn’t add in any cheese or a creamy dressing, but you could if you wanted too. The possibilities are endless.

We also adding in some vegetables from our fridge, it wasn’t apart of the assignment but we are big advocates of not wasting food in our house. Not only does it cost a lot, it’s hard to get to the store at times and it’s even been hit and miss to get good looking produce at the store (one day due to the humidity the vegetables and fruit were already going bad in the store, that was a sad day) and its not just my area as I’ve spoken with friends in different states and was told its the same where they are. So we added in some mushrooms, tomatoes and white onion.

We also added in some Italian dressing we had to the mix as well as Salt, Pepper and Garlic Powder. You can make your own dressing by adding in a ratio of Oil and Acid that is usually an ratio of 2/3 cup oil, 1/3 cup acid and your flavors of choice. We made one not used in this recipe that was oil, lemon and some brine from candied jalapeños for a spicy and tangy salad later in the week. You can have fun with it and they last about a week or two in the fridge depending on what’s inside of it (dressings with egg yolk like creaser will last shorter compared to ones without egg yolk.)

This was a fun Spring and Summer Recipe that is so versatile and can be made with anything you have on hand. The kids will be asking to bring out the spiralizer at all salad occasions in the future, that’s a major win to any parent reading this I hope (I know it has been in my house.)

So try it out and let me know what you think. Has a spiralizer changed your life for the good? Are you wanting to try some savory and warm dishes with it as well? If so stay tuned for more spiralizing goodness.

Many Blessings, Mercedes U. HHWC.