Fire Cooking Masterclass with Sarah Glover – Rainbow Salad

You know you’re eating healthy when all the colors of the rainbow are on your plate! The fresh produce is complemented by a delicious herb and balsamic dressing, but the thing that really makes this salad special is the way we hang and roast the veggies. This recipe is included in Wild Child, my kid’s adventure cookbook, along with some other fun and kid-friendly favorites.

Location: The Ecology Center

[Music] hi I’m Chef Sarah Glover I read an adventure cookbook especially for you and your kids and this book takes you on an incredible journey and it’s all about adventuring and cooking with your kids in The Great Outdoors I want to show you one of my favorite recipes and this is the fire salad it is really easy to make and I cook it on a regular basis what we’re going to be doing is basically hanging vegetables on the fire so I’ve got some beetroot here you want to make sure that when you’re um selecting your vegetables for this that you keep all of the leaves um and the stalks on your veggies because we need this to be able to hang them on the fire so what you guys are going to need is some butcher twine you want to make sure that your twine is not um covered in any form of plastic coating because that’s just going to melt over the fire um so we’re going to cut up some bits of string about about so big that’s about a meter maybe a bit more and all you’re going to do is get your vegetable and you’re going to tie off your string around the um stalk of the veggie just be mindful that you want to make sure it gets nice and tight because as this Cooks on the fire and the heat basically absorbs like takes the moisture out of what you’re cooking it’s going to shrink a little bit so this is looking pretty good to me we want to make sure that our vegetables like facing down towards the fire um and like I said just make sure it’s tied off nice and tight if your kids are helping maybe just um double check their knots on this this is a little fun exercise that you can do with your kids and teach them how to tie or knot um I’ve also got some carrots here again make sure the stalks are kept on them uh when you’re at the farmers’s market or at your local Farm Stand make sure you ask what’s in season other vegetables that could be really good to cook on the fire could include things like um you can do some spring onions you could also do some fennel bulbs any kind of root vegetable that grows under the ground is really great for this recipe also um brussel sprouts you can sometimes get them on the big stalks you could hang them over the fire and you’re probably thinking Sarah why am I going to be hanging my vegetables on the fire to cook them and the reason being is that it’s going to give you a really lovely Smoky flavor to your salad it’s also fun it looks really pretty um but the radiant heat is going to cook your vegetables and um you’ll be surprised at how delicious these turn out and they still stay quite alente and that means that they have a little bit of a bite to them so they’re not going to go too soggy if you don’t overcook them which we do not want to overcook them because this is going to be in a salad so when you’ve tied up all your vegetables what you’re wanting to do is have have a little pot of extra virgin olive oil and we’re just going to cover our veggie in some oil I just do it in a pot because um it’s easier you’re not going to waste too much extra virgin olive oil again this is fun to do with your kids they can get their hands dirty kids love to get messy um and then we’re going to get some sea salt and I’m just going to give this a little bit of a Sprinkle this is going to be flavor for our veggies now you can just hang them straight like this over our fire behind us by just tying it around um whatever your apparatus is another really handy um little thing to have in your kitchen in your outdoor fire tool kit are these S hooks and they’re butcher hooks so this is what a lot of butchers use to hang all of their meat um I have so many of them and they’re really really handy to have um like I said in your outdoor fire tool kit the idea is the root vegetables tend to be more starchy so they cook really well over the fire and then all we’re going to do at the top here is we’re just going to do a little like Loop so we just Loop it like so and then we’re just going to wrap it around our finger and create another loop and then we come up in and under and just pull it through and that way we’ve got a little hanging Hook and the beauty of this is that it just makes it easier to move it around the fire as it starts to cook down because obviously the most intense heat is going to be in through the center of our fire here so our beet treats are going to take a little longer to cook over our carrots so we might need to move things around if you don’t have um like a incredible setup like this in your backyard like most of you probably don’t um you can also use a tripod the other fun thing to do is even you know um with your kids go foraging for some sticks um and build a tripod yourself it’s really not that hard and you’ll find your kids will love this little exercise and the fun thing about doing it this way too with your kids is they’re going to want to try it because they’re going to be curious to know what this actually tastes like so perhaps this is a good way to get your kids to eat some vegetables now I’ve had my fire burning down for probably 2 to 3 hours now you only really need to have it going for an hour you just don’t want to be cooking with like a very strong flame you want it to be a little more um like of a radiant heat now don’t throw away this extra virgin olive oil either because you can use this for your salad dressing all right so this is going to take about an hour for this to cook like this um a thing to just be mindful of is when you’re trying to like figure out how hot your fire is if you hold your hand above the fire and you feel like you’re burning or you’re cooking yourself you know your Vegeta’s going to cook that’s how you always tell is just use your hands things to also be mindful of if it’s a really windy day it’s going to blow the heat out from underneath whatever you’re cooking and it will take a little bit longer um so always be mindful that if it was a little bit windy whereas today the wind tends to be coming from behind you would maybe move your like root like the beach route towards the front um like towards this side so it’s going to capture most of that heat and then whatever it is that you’re trying to cook a little bit slower you would then move it to the back where the wind is hitting it first it just takes practice you just have to give it a go so we have the absolute pleasure of being able to go and pick our own greens for the salad and what I found was some broad Bean leaves yes you can eat the broad Bean leaves I also found a few snow peas shoots and also a little bit of hydroponic masculin lettuce um I’m going to go give this a wash and we are going to take our carrots and beetroots off the fire we’re going to finish off our fire salad all right so this is the fun part this is when we get to pull down our vegetables off the fire and the way you know that they’re cooked is they just start to like soften up and triel a little bit we’re just going to chop that little carrot off here and it’s not a very complicated job we’re just going to slice him up I like to go um lengthways on mine and just do them in kind of like pretty slices cuz we’re going to arrange our salad which is always the fun po so I’m going to pull down a couple of my beetroot you can see the beetroot is like charred on the end and it started to get nice and soft here so I’m going to slice down through him now I leave my skin on you can take it off as well if you want to um if it’s soft enough it should just um come off by itself and again the way you cut up your vegetables is it’s really up to you you can get as creative as you want to you can do discs you can do little wedges it really doesn’t matter oops carry it down so I’m just going to set up my start to decorate my plate we’re going to arrange our Greens on here again this is so fun to do with your kiddos at home and another fun thing you can do with this recipe if you are traveling is learn how to actually identify and forage for some of your own greens broadbean leaves um obviously it’s only in the springtime that you typically get these you can also go to your local farmers market and get a nice um variety of mixed lettuce leaves you can do something like rikio you want to try and stay away from it being too bitter though and try and like add that sort of sweetness that you’re going to get from your greens a few beans here slice them in around our salad again this is like such a fun thing to do with your kids it also teaches them about all the different types of greens and vegetables like I said they might be inspired to eat some of this themselves then you’re just going to decorate your plate with your roasted smoked veggies this is just an example of how you can just pull the skin off your beetro or just like start to to come off really easy okay and then I’ve made a little dressing here that’s just got some balsamic and some extra virgin olive oil just going to give I’ve actually used a straw a strawberry balsamic today but you can just use like a um balsamic vinegarette as well and then you’re going to season it with some sea salt and I’ve got some um goats cheese here which is like a a hard rin’s goat cheese we’re just going to shave that over the top of it that’s going to add add a nice salty creamy flavor to your um smoked vegetable salad here we go I don’t really want to eat it because it just looks too pretty but this is just such a fun recipe that you can try at home on your next camping trip or in your backyard over the fire pit it’s a winter it will hold really well you can keep it for the next day if there are any leftovers and I guarantee your kids are going to want to try eating these veggies so thanks so much for joining and don’t forget to give it a little Thumbs Up Ring the little bell at the top so you know when I’ve got some next amazing recipes for you and please leave me some comments below even comments of things that you would like to see um me cook or Adventures you’d like me to go on or any tips and tricks that you um would love to learn I would love to hear from you guys thanks for [Music] joining