More Salads! Including Portobello Salad with Mustard Dressing

Are you guys getting sick of all the salad? I promise I'll post about some delicious baked good next time.

I've admired this salad in Veganomicon ever since I got the cookbook but for some reason never made it. As soon as I decided to take part in Leng's salad challenge I knew this was something I'd have to make! Marinated roasted portobellos, avocado, red onion, chickpeas, a mustard dressing - what more can I ask for? The grain portion of my salad was some tortilla "chips" that I made by cutting a tortilla up and toasting it. This was my favourite salad out of the last 6 salads. The roasted portobellos were really good and I loved the marinade so will use it with other vegetables or tofu. However I do not enjoy how expensive portobellos are.

Friday's salad was the least delicious salad of the week and also included ruining one of our pots when we were steaming the beets. Hopefully we can salvage it. Anyway the salad included beets, red onion, homemade garlic oregano basil parmesan breadcrumbs (didn't use enough oil this time to get things to stick to the bread), grated carrot, tofu marinated in the leftover portobello marinade, olives, red leaf lettuce, and the rest of the mustard dressing from the day before.

Today's salad was delicious crunchy romaine lettuce, beets, chickpeas, grated Gouda cheese, whole wheat pasta, and Caesar dressing. I love having the gouda in there.

I find it hard to come up with salads that incorporate grains. I think I prefer eating something on the side like bread or a savoury muffin or something. And I think I'm getting stuck trying to come up with yummy salad combinations. Any suggestions?

Portobello Salad with Mustard Dressing
Adapted from Veganomicon

Serves 4

Dressing
1/4 cup smooth mustard (Ashley note: I used some balsamic fig mustard I had but next time I'll go for dijon.)
1 1/2 tbsp olive oil
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
2 tbsp pure maple syrup

Salad
8 cups mixed greens
1 avocado, peeled, halved, pitted and cubed
1 small red onion, sliced into very thin half moons
15 ounce can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1 recipe Roasted Portobellos (recipe follows)

Preparing the dressing: Whisk all the ingredients together in a small bowl.

Toss all the salad ingredients together, except the portobellos. Add the dressing. Divide up the salad and place the sliced warm portobellos on top of each salad.

Roasted Portobellos
Adapted from Veganomicon

1/2 cup wine
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 large or up to 4 small portobello caps

Clean the portobello caps. Combine all ingredients for the marinade in a glass pie plate or small casserole. Place the mushrooms upside down in the marinade and spoon a lot of the marinade into each cap to form a small pool. Preheat the oven to 400F and marinated for about 20 minutes.

Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the foil, use tongs to flip the caps over, and cook, uncovered, for another 10 minutes. Let it cool a bit and then slice the mushrooms very thinly on the diagonal to make nice meaty slices.