Courtney Uncooked Episode 19: Courtney’s Quarantine Salad with special guest Kristyne Lotito
Intro: Courtney…Courtney Uncooked. I’m Courtney Uncooked cause that’s how I like my food. The vitamins and the minerals, you know they all get through. Absorbed into the body so that nothing gets lost when you start eating raw of your health you’ll be the boss. Raw vegan for my health and you know that health is wealth. To help you stay your best, we will welcome special guests. So let’s go make a recipe and have lots
of fun, your healthy living journey has just begun cause I’m Courtney…Courtney Uncooked. Courtney… Courtney Uncooked.
Courtney: Hi I’m Courtney UnCooked. And this is my dear friend, Kristyne Lotito. I’m so happy to see her today. It’s been way too long Kristyne, let’s don’t do that again. And I love Kristyne because she is just such a unique friend. She always mails me cards in the mail with checks to my favorite charity which, one of them is Stand Up for Kids. And just with a beautiful note that says Courtney, I love you thanks for all you do for everyone and for me and you’re just a great person. And she just really builds me up.
And people like Kristyne are rare, beautiful gems. And when you find one, you know, you really cherish it and they’re very hard to come by. So I’m just really, really blessed to be friends with you and I really appreciate, you know, always just your loyalty and your support. I’m a big Kristyne fan. I’m like the president of her fan club So I’m glad to have you here today and this is a crazy time and you and I have been talking and the key to today is really, you know, a famous yogic saying that I learned in Yogaville Virginia, adapt, adjust and accommodate. And if you can do those three things today, you’re going to make it.
Kristyne: You’ll get through this.
Courtney: And so Christine works at the Chesapeake Bay Distillery, which is right around the corner from my house. And Kristyne and her company are a beautiful shining example of adapting, adjusting, and accommodating during this time.
Kristyne: We did adapt, we did a complete 180 from producing spirits to producing hand sanitizer and some surface disinfectant. The demand has been overwhelming. And for a small business, it’s been a little challenging, but we’ve found some distribution channels for it and we’re just hoping to do our part to help the community.
Courtney: And what advice would you give a person trying to get through today? Like what’s something that we can all do to make our lives just a little bit easier?
Kristyne: Well, it doesn’t come easy for me, but I’m trying to be more patient, and empathetic, and realize that everyone is handling this very differently. So we really have to be patient with each other.
Courtney: That’s beautiful, that’s perfect. One thing, patience, I mean, at any time, how can we not have more patience? So yeah, I really liked that. So this salad, I had to adapt, adjust and accommodate because I invented this right when they did the stay at home order and I was scared and I’m sad to say that I lost my faith for a minute. I was really just filled with fear and I was scared to even go to the grocery store. So all I had was some lettuce from my garden.
And you know, I called my next-door neighbor and said, hey do you have any tomatoes I can borrow or anything for a salad? And she said, well, I’ve got carrots and onions. And I was thinking, ughhhhh, that’s what you got? Because it just wasn’t what I was in the mood for, but it was delicious. So this salad, has only carrots and onions and it’s fabulous and carrots and onions are great for you. Carrots are full of beta carotene and they help you see better and who doesn’t need to see better today. It’s like we’re all waking up and seeing more clearly today, right?
And then some onions which are anti-inflammatory and they’re so good for you. And speaking of onions, how did the onion propose to the other onion Kristyne?
Kristyne: Oh gosh, I have no idea.
Courtney: With an onion ring.
Courtney: All right, so we’re going to get started. So I like to just take the lettuce from my garden, rinse it off really good. Even if it’s organic, it doesn’t matter to me. I rinse everything off and soak it if I can. And then just spin it dry in my handy dandy salad spinner. And do you want me to lettuce you?
Kristyne: Yes, please.
Courtney: Okay. All right, I’ll just give you some lettuce and then I like to just break it up in pieces sometimes on my bowl and add some carrots. Now you can just chop the carrots up and have them be nice and crunchy. I love the taste of carrot sometimes, but not the crunch. So I actually like to, and yeah, you can show the carrots. I like to just shave my carrots with a peeler so I’ve got that taste and it’s not crunchy.
Kristyne: Shall I carrot you?
Courtney: Yes, please carrot me as well. And then we just have the onions on the top and the onions are great. They’re so anti-inflammatory. They lower your cholesterol. I mean, onions are a wonderful thing to eat as well as carrots. And then I’m going to get started on the first dressing. So I made this from what I had on hand as well. And at first, I didn’t care, I thought it was the end of the world so I put in a fourth of a cup of olive oil in my dressing.
I try to use as little oil as possible and folks always say, well, isn’t it good to have some oil? Absolutely. The oil that’s in avocado, the oil that’s in an olive, when you eat it and it’s in the natural state, not oil that’s been processed and pulled out of it. Do you know what I’m saying? Like you want to eat your oils in the foods and not necessarily drink them.
So as far as processed oils like this, you do want to very, very much lower them. But at that time I didn’t care. So I’ve got a fourth of a cup of extra Virgin olive oil and I’m not sure what makes an olive an extra Virgin, but somehow we found it and here it is.
Kristyne: Don’t ask questions.
Courtney: And then we’re going to take the zest from one lemon and one lime and also the juice from one lemon and one lime. And we’re just going to put this right in a jar, save a step and just shake it up when we’re done. And so we’ve got the juice from one lime and one lemon. And just a little trick, I don’t know, I’m sure you do know this because you’re an amazing cook yourself. If you just kind of rub your lemon down, you get more juice out of it when you’re ready.And then to zest, you just always want to bring your zester down and up.
Kristyne: You don’t lose any that way, right?
Courtney: Yes.
Kristyne: Even just smelling it when you’re zesting it’s awesome.
Courtney: I know it’s like the freshest thing. So then you’re going to put your salt and pepper or whatever kind of salt you have, garlic, salt, sea salt, Celtic salt, doesn’t matter. Whatever you have on hand. And the pepper could be fresh, cracked pepper, white pepper. I’m going to put that right in there. Put the top on, mix it up. That is it. So I lived off this for about a week and then I started feeling heavy and I said, all right, I’m going to get off the oil now. And then I just made a little dressing without any oil at all. And I’m going to let you put that together. And that’s going to start with a fourth of a cup of vinegar, not vinegar, a little white wine vinaigrette.
Kristyne: So you adapted.
Courtney: I did. And then some maple syrup.
Kristyne: And the Bragg’s Amino’s?
Courtney: Yes and a fourth of a teaspoon of garlic salt.
Kristyne: Now do you trust me to do the dashes?
Courtney: I do. So I do two big dashes of cayenne pepper in this and I love that. If you don’t like cayenne pepper, just do a dash or half a dash. But you got to put some in there to give it that oomph.
Kristyne: Especially with the apple cider vinegar.
Courtney: And this still isn’t heavy. I mean this is still pretty light.
Kristyne: It’s nice to have options.
Courtney: Yes. So we’re going to try this, kind of put a little of this on the left and a little of that on the right. But I got to say now when I’m making salads, I’ll put this little bit will go over a huge salad if you do it all at one time and mix it together. So I would recommend that. But today we’re just going to make it on these little plates. All right, so we’ll start here.
Kristyne: This is great to make sure it’s mixed thoroughly and to be portable.
Courtney: Yeah, I lived off that.
Kristyne: But it’s so fresh, you can live on this.
Courtney: And you know, that’s another thing that’s great about this time too, is we’re relying on each other more. Instead of just getting in my car and driving to the store, I called my neighbor. My neighbor comforted me. My neighbor gave me the ingredients to make this and some love and a virtual hug. I could hear in her voice. And that’s one of the best things about this time is that we’re all coming together and it’s a beautiful thing.
Kristyne: Yep.Courtney: Making a quarantine salad with my girl Kristyne in a time when people aren’t even supposed to convene, I had to borrow the ingredients from my neighbor. But the onions and the carrots were really a savior. The dressing I whipped up from what I had on hand, so I was really surprised when it tasted so grand. No, you don’t need a stove or an oven to cook just a blender, dehydrator, and Courtney Uncooked.