Spinach gazpacho and pasta salad

Most people prefer fresh cold soups in the summer time, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have it in warm fall as well. If it’s better, you can even call it green smoothie 🙂

We have already done the cold soup thing at Hungry Pumpkin when we prepared the classic Spanish gazpacho, a tomato soup eaten chilled. This time we decided to make a similar dish except to base it on green spinach and cauliflower. We have also previously prepared pasta salads, but there is an infinite number of possibilities for this, so it is a different adventure every time! 


Recipe, preparation, and price

 

Quantity

(g or ml)

Price for

4 person (EUR)

Soup

 

 

Spinach

200

0,80

Olive oil

10

0,06

Garlic

10

0,08

Cauliflowe

200

0,26

Yeast flakes

15

0,30

Salt

7

0,00

Main dish

Celety

200

0,40

Chickpea

200

0,50

Cucumber

200

0,25

Tomato

200

0,22

Pasta

250

0,72

Parsley

20

0,60

Olive oil

30

0,18

Salt

10

0,01

Salat

Lettuce

250

0,40

Pumpkin seed oil

8

0,10

Vinegar

4

0,02

Salt

3

0,00

Together

4,86

 

We gradually added our spinach to cold water, mixing it up with our stick mixer. We used a lot of spinach, and the slow addition of the leaves allowed us to ensure that everything got blended in. We also added raw cauliflower, garlic, a tablespoon of nutritional yeast flakes, some salt, and a bit of olive oil. We mixed this all together and then put it in the fridge for half an hour to chill. 

While we had the soup chilling, we tackled the main course. First, we cooked our pasta. While this boiled away, we sliced up our vegetables (cucumbers, tomatoes, parsley, and celery, a nice summery mix!) into pieces of desired size. We also added in chickpeas, not just enhancing the taste and texture, but also the nutritional content. We cooked our own chickpeas this time, and since we had decided on the dish last minute, we had to cook them a bit longer since we had not soaked them. As such, this took about an hour and a half! Once the pasta was cooked, we drained it and allowed it to cool before adding in our sliced vegetables. We salted the salad to taste, seasoned with Mediterranean herbs, and topped it all off with some olive oil.

Pasta salad is a great dish, especially since you can eat it later in the day (or even the following day) which means you don’t need to prepare it right when you plan to eat! In addition to the pasta salad, we also prepared a green salad with pumpkin oil.

The price of our lunch for 4 was 4.86€, which is 1.2€ per person. The most expensive ingredients were the pasta and parsley if they come from the store; our parsley came from our window boxes, so it helped cut down our costs in making this dish.


Nutritional value

With lunch consumed quantity

% From daily needs

Energy

499

kcal

25

Proteins

17

g

30

Total fats

15

g

33

Carbohydrates

78

g

 

Starch

12

g

 

Sugar

7

g

 

Fibers

11

g

42

Calcium (Ca)

167

mg

17

Iron (Fe)

6

mg

55

Magnesium (Mg)

125

mg

31

Phosphorus (P)

308

mg

44

Potassium (K)

1222

mg

61

Sodium (Na)

2301

mg

418

Zinc (Zn)

2

mg

23

Copper (Cu)

1

mg

53

Manganese (Mn)

2

mg

81

Selenium (Se)

26

µg

52

Vitamin A

511

µg

51

Vitamin E

5

mg

30

Vitamin D

0

µg

0

Vitamin C

64

mg

64

Thiamin (B1)

1

mg

91

Riboflavin (B2)

1

mg

63

Niacin (B3)

8

mg

51

Pantothenic acid (B5)

1

mg

24

Vitamin B6

1

mg

35

Folic acid (B9)

416

µg

104

Vitamin B12

0

µg

1

Vitamin K

451

µg

644

 

As usual, we consumed 25% of our daily caloric needs with this meal, also managing to get as much as 30% of our daily requirement for protein, 42% for fiber, and 33% for fats.

The meal was also rich in both vitamins and minerals, giving us 55% of our daily dose of iron, 31% for magnesium, 61% for potassium, and 52% for selenium. We fell a bit short on zinc (23%) and calcium (17%), but these could easily be made up for in other meals throughout the day.

The main vitamin we consumed was B1, which we got 91% of our daily requirement for (mainly from the nutritional yeast). We also got a lot of vitamin C (64%) mainly from the spinach and cauliflower and vitamin B2 (63%) from the yeast flakes and spinach. Our lunch was also rich in other vitamins, though lacked vitamins D and B12, as is normal for unfortified vegan foods.

If you have questions about today’s lunch (or ideas for future lunches) then feel free to write to us at info@hungry-pumpkin.com and we will get back to you!

Have a great weekend!

-The Hungry Pumpkin Team

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