Nyomi's Christmas Salads

Living in North Queensland, we keep our Christmas meals on the cool and light side rather than having the oven on all day! So salads are always on the menu. I've got two salad recipes for you that we love having at Christmas time.

We try to keep Christmas pretty simple food wise so there are only enough leftovers to eat on Boxing Day (no cooking!) and there is no waste.

We usually have a ham that's purchased a few weeks out from Christmas and we start eating it straight away. December is a bit of a food treat month for us!

Some years, we do a roast pork, other years we do prawns.

We generally don't do pudding or fruit cake for dessert, we try to keep the sugar to a minimum. Dessert is usually served fro dinner on Christmas day and we buy the small meringue shells and top with whipped cream or coconut cream, mixed berries, mango and passionfruit to make mini pavlovas. 

On Christmas morning we usually have fried eggs, bacon, ham, croissants and fruit.

So, onto the salads. I hope you enjoy them as much as we do! 

Christmas Cabbage Salad

1 whole wombok cabbage sliced
4 shallots sliced
Pine nuts or slivered almonds, toasted
1 packet of Changs original fried noodles or Changs crunchy noodles

Dressing ingredients:
¼ cup white vinegar
¼ cup castor sugar
1 tbsp Soy Sauce or tamari
2 tsp Sesame Oil 
½ cup olive oil

Put together in a large bowl the cabbage and shallots, add pine nuts/almonds. We leave the salad dry and add noodles and dressing at the time of plating.

Mix all the dressing ingredients into a jar and pop lid on and shake, shake before applying to your salad. This dressing is the one of the back of the noodle packet.

Prosciutto and Chicken Salad

4-6 slices of proscuitto
1 chicken breast 
1/4 cup of pine nuts toasted
1 large bag of baby spinach or salad mix
1 red capsicum
Small squeeze of honey
1 red onion
1 tomato

Slice proscuito and chicken breast and fry off in a fry pan until cooked.
Toast pine nuts in the oven stirring often or dry fry on a fry pan while stirring.
Slice capsicum and fry in a small amount of olive oil. Once the capsicum starts to soften, add a squeeze of honey and continue to fry till softened through, remove from heat.
Dice the tomato and onion and add to a salad bowl with spinach/lettuce and toss through all the cooked ingredients.

This salad is so versatile in regards to the dressing. You can eat it without dressing which is nice due to the cooking oils and juices of the meat and capsicum.Alternatively, it tastes just as good with ranch, Caesar or balsamic glaze.

Do you have any great salads you make at Christmas time? Let us know!