Health Food - Fun Worm Salad for Kids

Lisa Wilson: Hi, I am Lisa Wilson; Certified Health Counselor in Northern Virginia and founder of Nourished LLC. We are putting together a sprout bean corn salad. I know it doesnt sound like something that most kids would eat but I call it worm salad. Ill show you why in a little bit. But first I just want to show, I was just at my herb garden picking some fresh herbs for the salad. I found some basil, I didnt find too much basil, it looks Ive used most of my basil couple of days ago in my pasta. I am just going to go ahead and start clipping it into the bowl, some parsley and you know what, if you dont have an herb garden, no problem, this is the first year Ive done it. It is so much fun to just be able to step outside and clip your herbs but if you dont have one, you can pick these up fresh at the store and even dried will work in a pinch.

Now, freshness is just going to give it that kick and just bring it alive. I have some oregano here. I just kind of picked whatever I had of lot of. Today I seemed to have a lot of thyme, a lot of oregano so I am just going to go ahead and cut that in. To tell you truth, when eat the salad, I cant necessarily take the one herb; it just tastes fresh, thats all. Now, I am going to come back to these because behind me I hear my corn boiling. So, I am going to get that off the stove, pay a little attention to that and come right back to it. So, right before I stepped outside, I put some frozen corn on and this is such an easy salad to try altogether. So, there we go. Drain the corn into the bowl, stove off of course, into the bowl right here, finally, I am going to top off my corn with a little bit of butter and now this butter comes straight from the farm. You can see how beautiful it is; its yellow in color, its a color that butter should be, full of all the delicious vitamins, the vitamin A, the vitamin D, the CLA. Its exactly what you wanted from farm butter. I happened to be along to a farm and like I said, in Pennsylvania, thats where I get all of my dairy, my butter, my meat. Sometimes some produce in the summer times. If you dont have access to that, your health food store would be just fine too; my organic corn came from the frozen section of whole foods. So, I have my corn, I am just going to let it cool there for a minute and I am going to tell you about beans; these beans that we are going to be using are the black beans. Beans will not give you a problem; digestive problems if they are properly prepared. These beans have been soaked overnight and then I cook them for about three hours. These happened to be leftovers; I used them for a soup a couple of days ago and have some leftover beans. So again, all this is really easy to put together and then the fun part, the worm part. These are French lentils, they start out looking, they are hard and they are green, they are real small. You put them in a jar of water; you cover them with water and just right here on your counter over night. Thats all you do. Then what you do, when you wake up in the morning, you take your lentils and you rinse them in your filtered tap water. You rinse them a couple of times. You find the strain, I got the strain seriously from the local hardware store, you put it on top, you get your rubber band, just like this and you let it drain, just like that. Simple as that, you do it for two days. Every time you walk in the kitchen, you just grab your lentils, give it a rinse, give it another rinse right here upside down and two days later, you have these incredible sprouts. Now, what you have done is, youve turned these dormant little legumes into little plants and they are fantastic for your body. I am just going to retain here and show you what it looks like and this is what we call the worm. Can you see that? In our worm salad. The kids go crazy when they put a spoon full of worms in their mouths. So, I am going to set those there, you can take a look at those, again, we are just going to start keep going on the salad. I have a few more herbs to put in, I have some thyme, no, this is my rosemary. I am going to cut my rosemary right in there. Again, it just depends how many herbs you want in your salad. I like a lot of herbs. Okay, good thyme, very easy thyme, just well pull right off right into your salad. For now, I think thats enough, I want more later, Ill go ahead, add a little more. But here is what we are going to do, we are going to put this all together. So, here we go, sprouts into the bowl, beans into the bowl, corn into the bowl; buttered corn right into the bowl. Pinch of sea salt; again, that really moist, delicious, grey sea salt. I like Celtic sea salt but any good sea salt would do. So, I have my sea salt, freshly ground pepper, and finally some olive oil. This is just going to marry all those flavors, bring it all together, I think I might put some more herbs in because theres actually quite a bit of salad in this bowl. Spoon to stir, here we go. Oh, look at that, its so delicious. You have on a summer day, in fact, this is one of my favorite salads, I make it a lot, its incredibly healthy; lots of fiber, lots of protein from the beans and the lentils. The kids love to pretend like they are eating little worms. So, I am going to tug this away, we are going to have a fun finger food party coming up soon. Actually, this is not going to be finger food, we are going to eat it. I think its good to eat the finger foods, I guess they could eat those worms with their fingers. So, here we go, into the refrigerator we are going to chill this for about half an hour and then the kids will be here.