When One Chip Is Too Many...

I hate farewells. A close friend of mine is leaving the country in less than a couple of weeks, pretty much for good. So I have been trying to spend all my spare time with her, thus I haven’t been baking or blogging. I refuse to count down the days left before she leaves, but as that date gets closer and her departure inevitable, it seems that the only sure thing to do is spend whatever precious moments we have left together.

So what we have been doing is gratuitously spending up all over Sydney, exposing her to everything the city has to offer before she leaves our fair shores. With full time work and tyring to fit in shopping sprees, outings and eating lots of foods it's a lot of hard work. It’s quite exhausting in fact, and not to mention the cost. But who can put a price on friendship?

Well to offset this current lifestyle of constant shopping and feasting- it sounds glamorous but really isn’t- especially when your wallet cannot support your habit, I needed to fill my diet with something other than coffee, gelato, chocolate and donuts, and Nutella donuts at that. Aside from eating food that I would consider “shopping fuel”, the worst kind, I haven’t really had the chance to eat something good, not just something delicious, but actually nutritious.

It’s not too long until my friend E leaves and I won't always have this constant excuse to live it up, but meanwhile I needed a healthy respite from my overindulgence. You don’t even want to know how many bowls chips (that's fries for the Americans) I have consumed this past week, and let’s not talk about the pastries we've gobbled up! I just know that the next Nutella donut I am eating will be going straight to my thighs.

So here is a fresh salad that I made as an equaliser for my nutrient deprived body. I am dubbing it the Farewell salad as it represents a few different farewells going on right now. First, it’s a farewell to summer. Officially summer has gone, but it still feels like she is lurking around the place as the heat and humidity haven’t really left us. And secondly, the salad is an early farewell, to all this eating out and bingeing, I really need to rein this in before I become Shamu.

When I get into this grind of eating badly, I start to hate healthy food. So I have to retrain my body to want to crave good foods. So here is a salad I made of roasted vegies. I couldn’t go without some sort of fat on the vegies, as you know, a junkaholic like me has to ease my way back into this healthy thing, so I opted for roasted vegies.

The salad is a combination of asparagus (blanched), roasted yellow squash, beetroot, cherry tomatoes and baby carrots, with a sprinkling of lightly toasted hazelnuts and a splash of homemade Hazelnut dressing. You can use the dressing for pretty much any combination of vegetables, so here is the recipe.

Hazelnut Vinaigrette

1 clove garlic, crushed
a pinch of salt
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
2 tbsp hazelnut oil
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil

Place ingredients in a small bowl and whisk until emulsified. Pour generously over salad.