By the spoonful

I’ve been visiting the great blog 101 Cookbooks a lot lately. It’s written by Heidi Swanson, author of the cookbook Super Natural Cooking. Her blog is full of recipes, most of which are made with whole, natural foods. I’ve been searching her recipe index for things I can make on my limited diet, and one of the ones I squirelled away was a brown rice and asparagus dish.

To be honest, it didn’t sound that exciting – a mix of brown rice, chickpeas and asparagus with toasted almonds and a tahini dressing. Healthful, but maybe not out of this world. I shouldn’t have judged it. Being on this diet is quickly reminding me that sometimes it’s the simplest combinations of foods that are the most delicious.

This dish blew me out of the water. It’s so flavourful that I gobbled it up for supper, lunch and breakfast. And as soon as I scraped the container clean I started craving more.

The rice mixture is good, but what takes this over the top is the phenomenal dressing. I kind of want to email Heidi to personally thank her for this dressing. It’s actually more of a sauce/dressing – a bit too heavy for a green salad but perfect for something with rice or beans or vegetables. This is the kind of dressing I want to eat by the spoonful. The kind I want to keep a jar of in the fridge at all times to dress up bland foods. I seriously can’t think of much it wouldn’t taste good with.

And the best part? Four ingredients, people! It just goes to show that simple and healthy is sometimes the best thing. But of course I have to tell myself that, since I can’t eat sugar or chocolate for another two weeks.

You can find the recipe here – when I made the dressing I didn’t have any lemons so I subbed in lime juice and lime zest. Maybe that’s what made it so good?? I’m sure it would be great with lemon too.