Mish-mash salad from the leftover veggies in your fridge

I shared stats in my last post (step #10) about the cost of food waste. The average home throws away over $3k worth of food in a year!

I had planned to do our grocery shopping almost 1 week ago but I challenged myself to a ‘buy nothing new’ challenge. We had some veggies in the bottom of the veggie crisper, to be honest my excitement for them was wavering – but I was determined to use what was there.

I’ve made this mish-mash salad from the leftover veggies in my fridge. I will say, I did buy eggs and the sweet potato.

In the video, I talk through a few elements I teach in my program Kitchen Saucery. Starting with:

• Cook what you’re excited to eat, as the first hurdle to getting in the kitchen.

• One of my favourite bits of equipment (other than a knife and chopping board) to make your meals and salads interesting.

• A simple way to make your roasted veggies different

• My guide to making a simple oily salad dressing

• Why recipes are killing your kitchen mojo

Watch the video and scroll below to grab the recipe for my mish-mash leftover veggies salad.

Ingredients

This is a recipe for whatever you’ve got in your fridge, but here’s a general guide and what I’ve used.

• A chunk of leftover sourdough

• Extra virgin olive oil

• Veg to be roasted: I used sweet potato, beetroot, eggplant, broccoli

• Salt

• Fresh leaves: I used cos lettuce

• Fresh veg: I used half a cucumber and half a carrot

• Herbs: I used coriander

• 1 boiled egg (per person)

• Pepper

• Balsamic vinegar

• Garlic

• 1 tsp dijon mustard

• Optional delicious toppings: toasted nuts or seeds, yoghurt to top, pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, olives

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C.

2. Chop bread into crouton sizes and scatter on baking tray. Coat with around 1 tbsp olive oil and mix well. Place in oven to cook for approx 15-20 minutes, until browned and crunchy to your liking.

3. Chop your veggies for roasting, I chopped into small cubes. Place on baking trays, I try to keep the veg separate, as they’ll cook at different timings and this way I can easily remove them from the trays as I need to. Coat with around 2 tbsp olive oil and a good 2 pinches of salt and mix well. Place in oven to cook for approx 15-30 minutes.

4. Prep your fresh veggies, wash and rip lettuce, diced cucumber and carrot and chop coriander. Place in bowl.

5. Add boiled egg or any other protein you like.

6. Make your dressing by grabbing a small jar with a lid – my rough guide is 3 tbsp olive, 1 tbsp vinegar, 1/2 – 1 tsp mustard, a touch of garlic (grated on a microplane), a good pinch of salt and pepper. Shake well to combine and taste test. It needs to be punchy as we’re using quite a few watery ingredients which will dial it down. Adjust as you need with more oil, vinegar, mustard, garlic, salt and pepper.