Meatless Monday Recipe: Brown Rice Salad - Vegetarian (Delia Smith)

Meatless Monday is an international campaign that encourages people not to eat meat on Mondays to improve their health and the health of the planet. Although I am a meat lover, I do not mind going vegetarian from time to time, especially for a delicious vegetarian dish such as this brown rice salad from Delia Smith.

In my home, we eat a mix of both brown rice and white rice (long grain or Japanese Calrose). We like ecoBrown's Gold wholegrain rice mix which includes unpolished brown rice with black rice and red rice. My children actually enjoy eating brown rice, so they had no problems with this brown rice salad. Furthermore, it has got many of their favorite ingredients such as cherry tomatoes, walnuts, apple and raisins.

The brown rice is cooked and then seasoned with a French vinaigrette dressing (recipe here), before all the other ingredients are added. For me, this is a very healthy yet wonderfully delicious salad. On this occasion, I served it with my chicken with barbecue sauce but this would work great as a meal on its own. This is quite a substantial and filling salad, thanks to the brown rice used. I will be having more Meatless Mondays from now on ;)

Brown Rice Salad
Recipe adapted from Delia Smith
Preparation time: 10 - 15 minutes
Cooking time: 30 minutes (for the rice)
Serves 4

Ingredients
180-200g brown rice, cooked
1 quantity vinaigrette dressing (see Recipe here)

1/2 Japanese cucumber, chopped into small cubes
3 spring onions, very finely chopped
8 cherry tomatoes, chopped into small cubes
1/2 red or green pepper, deseeded and finely chopped
1 red dessert apple, chopped but not peeled
25g currants or raisins
25g walnuts, finely chopped
Salt and freshly milled black pepper


1. Cook the brown rice, once cooked place rice into a salad bowl, fluff it up with a fork and pour the dressing over (start with 3 tablespoons then add more to taste) while it's still hot. Mix well.

2. Allow the rice to cool and then mix in all the other ingredients, tasting to check the seasoning and season with salt and pepper as required. Keep in a cool place until needed.

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I am submitting this to the "Cook Like Delia Smith" bloghop which I am co-hosting with Zoe of Bake for Happy Kids and Mich of Piece of Cake. To join, simply cook or bake any recipe from any Delia Smith websites or cookbooks and blog hop with us for the whole month of March 2013.

Your post must be a current post i.e. posted in March 2013 - please do not link older posts.Please mention Cook like a Star in your post and link back to Zoe of Bake for Happy Kids, Mich of Piece of Cake and Baby Sumo of Eat your heart out.

You can get the HTML code here: get the InLinkz code (Click on the link, copy and paste the HTML code into your blog post where you want the blog hop list to appear. Make sure you are in HTML mode when you paste in the code)

Happy cooking! Do check out the other bloggers recipe below:

I am also submitting this to my friend mui mui's Little Thumbs Up "Tomato" event.