Cleansing and nutritious beet and quinoa salad with greens, dried cranberries and sunflower seeds

Vegan

Salads are one of my favorite go-to meals, especially now, in the spring when the cleanse season has already begun. This recipe will be a great support during any cleansing routine. The simple salad made with protein-rich cooked quinoa tossed with raw veggies, dried cranberries and sunflower seeds can be an excellent breakfast, lunch or dinner dish and is both cleansing and nutritious.

The raw beet, with its many cleansing* and detoxifying** nutrients, is an essential ingredient in the cleanse process. Vitamin A present in the carrot helps the liver flush out the toxins from the body, selenium in the sunflower seeds efficiently eliminates mercury from the body and vitamin C and antioxidants in the cranberries fight the free radicals, preventing the development of cancer cells.

While nutrition is the main focus in my meal preparation, I also try to apply the Ayurvedic “six tastes rule”, which means using ingredients representing sweet, sour, salty, pungent, astringent and bitter taste, all in one meal. According to Ayurveda, each taste plays a vital role in our health and well-being.  The taste is a powerful stimulant of our digestive fire and activating agent for the proper absorption of nutrients.  Ayurveda believes that to properly function, all the organs in the body should be equally activated. And the organs can be stimulated by activating the taste buds that correspond to those organs.

That rule may be especially worth remembering for those of us, who live in the West, where people tend to overindulge in sweet, sour and salty tasting foods, avoiding ingredients with “difficult” astringent, pungent and bitter taste. The imbalance of tastes in our Western diet affects our health and mood. The stressful lifestyle typical for the West urges us to reach for easy on the palate sweet snacks that for a short time will soothe the mind. But excessive consumption of addictive sweet foods promotes congestion and contributes to anxiety and depression. Overuse of salt in our diet disguises the authentic deliciousness of foods and leads to water retention in the body and eventually, to high blood pressure. Sour tasting foods, eaten in excess, can stimulate joint inflammation or cause heartburn. For those reasons it's important to retrain our palates and make them accept foods with "less popular" pungent, astringent and bitter taste to balance the consumption of the over popular sweet, sour and salty tasting foods.

The ingredients that I used for this salad are a balanced composition of the following tastes:

Quinoa- pungent
Beet – sweet
Carrot- sweet, astringent
Collard greens – bitter
Dried cranberries – sweet, sour
Sunflower seeds – sweet
Lemon juice – sour
Olive oil – sweet
Black pepper and cayenne pepper – pungent
Coriander seeds – sweet
Agave nectar - sweet

* eliminates toxins from liver cells
**clears the toxins removed from the liver and prevents them from reincorporating back into the body

 Ingredients:                                                  

• 1/2 cup dry quinoa (yields about 11/2 cup when cooked)
• 1/4 cup organic raw beets, peeled and finely grated
• 2 tbsp organic carrots, peeled and finely grated
• 1/2 cup organic baby greens (spinach or collard greens), packed
• 1/3 cup dried cranberries
• 1/3 cup raw unsalted sunflower seeds, lightly toasted
• 8-10 coriander seeds
• salt, pepper to taste

Dressing:

• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 2 tbsp lemon juice, freshly squeezed
• 1 tsp agave nectar
• pinch of cayenne

Combine the 1/2 cup of dry quinoa with 1 1/2 cup water in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer until tender and most of the liquid has been absorbed, 15 to 20 minutes. Turn off the heat, cover the saucepan with a lid and let it sit for about 5-10 minutes. Fluff with a fork and let it cool off.

In a medium bowl mix the cooked quinoa with grated beets and carrots. Mix well until the salad becomes uniformly red. Add the greens, cranberries and toasted sesame seeds. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Prepare the dressing by mixing olive oil with lemon juice, agave nectar and cayenne pepper. Pour the dressing over the salad and mix well.