Chive salad – for low fodmapers missing onion.

This salad has onion flavour as it’s base and uses chives to achieve this. It can be made without the chive flowers but if you can get them they do make a really pretty addition to this dish. I am really lucky where I live as we have the Incredible Edible scheme. This is a organisation that has planted lots of edible herbs and fruit trees around the town that are available for all residents and visitors to sample for free – as long as you know what you are looking for and what flowers are edible and can be used. I have gathered the chive flowers (the light purple ones – see image below), fennel leaves and borage flowers (the deep blue ones that I have used for garnish.) So for me this recipe was reasonable in cost because the herbs were free. There was also a pleasure gained in going for a walk and gathering my own food.

You can modify this recipe to make it more simple by just using chive stems and any green/red salad leaves to base the salad on, plus the borage flowers are not a necessary ingredient for the integrity of the dish. I produced this recipe without dressing as I felt the chives added plenty of strong flavour but you can add some if you wish- do check the label for fodmap ingredients. If you struggle with resistant starches then serve the rice whilst it is still slightly warm.

Ingredients

75g of cooked wholegrain and red rice

4 chive flower heads and stems

4 chard leaves and stems

1/2 packet of low lactose mozzarella

2 sprigs of fennel leaves

seasoning

Method

Chop the chive stems and chard stems into small pieces

Rip the chard leaves into small pieces

If needed cook the rice by covering in cold water and bringing it to the boil – season then cool and drain.

If using the chive flowers cut the individual flowers from the flower head

Rip the low lactose mozzarella into bite size pieces

Pull the fennel leaves into small pieces

Combine everything and serve

Serves one – enjoy!