Busy mom with many late afternoon activities like me? In the fall and winter, I love a warm meal but on a sunny day or on heavy activity days, I also will make a cold meal salad if I can have most of it ready before I leave.

This salad does not require any cooking. And if you have no trouble digesting raw vegetables, you will love a sweet and savory, crunchy and slightly biting salad. Shaved Brussels sprouts and walnuts provide a crunch, avocado and/or goat cheese, a soft creaminess, ham is the savory, apple and celery are the sweet. An olive oil and old style mustard dressing gives it a slight bite and character.

If you didn’t think of these ingredient in combination, try them out, you could be surprised how much you like it!

Raw Foods Are More Nutrient Dense

I grew up in a family that went through a lot of produce. Brussels sprouts was never one of them. I rediscovered them as an adult, roasted, or steamed and mixed with other fall vegetables.

Shaved Sprouts Rocked My World

Discovering them raw and shaved in a salad was a revelation. For one, I had never contemplated eating them raw, but what a genius idea to eat them shaved! Sprouts are easier to bite in this bite-size format. Their taste are easier to feel on your palate, and flavors combinations starts being interesting. Since that first time I ate them shaved at a friend’s dinner, I made a few versions of my own. This one is the version I love the most.

I loved that I discovered another vegetable I could now eat raw that I had not considered before! As I explained in other posts, cooking any produces starts destroying some nutrients. This is why I advocate for gentle steam cooking with a steam cooker cooking foods with non-pressurized steam, like the Vitaliseur. That is why I decided to become a “prescriber” and get my American and Canadian followers 10% off with discount with code “steamedcuisine”.

Another Opportunity to Eat More Raw Produce

Even if I was lucky to find an ideal cooking method that preserves as many nutrients as possible as well as cleanses them from toxines (for more info, see post In 2024, Integrate The Steamed Cuisine Lifestyle Into Your Life!), I still find it important try to eat as many raw foods as I can, for taste, nutrient density and plant hormones which keep my hormones well balanced.

Produce is most nutrient dense when in the soil, of course: it is alive and closest to its source of nutrition. From the point of pick up, nutrients start degrading. Color, a marker of nutrient density, starts fading. So I make sure to eat a wide diversity of raw produce, in the form of appetizers, side salad, or as one-meal-salads. I get the most color = vitamins, texture = fibers = prebiotics (among others), and original flavors from raw produce.

How to Create A Fun Salad

I love a savory salad that mixes fruit in. It’s also a guarantee my kids will try the salad: they are fruit lovers. Thanks to my husband who always demands some form of protein, I decided to add ham to an apple salad, and the result was pretty convincing!

Whenever I Make Salad, I Try to Include:

• savory taste like cheese (goat or sheep!) and/or meat;
• some crunch in the form of fruit, nuts and seeds, and/or sprouted seeds;
• some creaminess, with avocado or goat cheese;
• leafy vegetables like lettuce or kale, with as much color as I can;
• a stingy flair ( as my kids call it) with green onions or pickled red onions, or diced red onions soaked in olive oil;
• sweetness with fresh fruit;
• acidity with vinegar or lemon;
• Optionally, a grain or legumes to fill up kids’ demanding stomach.

More examples of tasty salads

You can check some of my salads like the Mediterranean Rice and Tuna Salad, the Kale & Quinoa Lemony Goodness salad; and for a sweet salad the Winter Pear and Pomegranate Salad And Its Grenadine Dressing. Some of these salads I make completely raw, some are made using the steam cooker to prepare some of the ingredients I use.

I will have many other salads to post for you that fit that profile if you are interested ! You just have to subscribe to my newsletter to make sure not to miss them! Learn about baking cakes and steaming them in the gentle steam cooker Vitaliseur (purchase with “steamedcuisine” code) for a result that will blow your tastebuds! Learn more about the Vitaliseur steam cooker here.

A salad That Can Be Dairy Free

This Brussels sprouts salad is neither vegetarian, nor vegan, nor dairy free. It is gluten free. Alternatives to this version of Brussels’ sprouts salads:

Optionally you can:

• Skip the ham and replace the goat cheese with another avocado.
• You can also replace apples with pears, and ham with slices of prosciutto!
• Walnuts can be replaced with pecans, or a crunchy seeds like sunflower seeds.

All the ingredients in? Let’s make this!