Green Mango Salad + Welcome to VeganMoFo

October is the worldwide Vegan Month of Food or VeganMoFo. It is an annual blogging event, created by Isa Chandra Moskowitz (cookbook author and creator of the amazing Post Punk Kitchen online community). VeganMoFo is now in its third year. The aim of VeganMoFo is for bloggers to write posts about vegan food each business day, or more, for the month of October. It is a celebration of the amazing range, creativity and geographical spread of vegan food. The list of participants is apparently more than 320 people. The amazing Kittee is doing most of the organisation for the event this year. You can find more information at her blog, Cake Maker to the Stars.

On to the food! As you have probably noticed from other posts on this blog, I love Asian food. It is delicious, easily made vegan, and relies on fresh vegetables, which are a big favourite for me in any meal. I also love salads in hot weather.

The two came together in a tangy green mango salad. I have been curious about green mango for years, since I had a student who had grown up in north Queensland and who raved about them. I had looked at many different recipes for green mango salad on the net. When I saw green mangoes at the Asian supermarket, I had to get them.

Here are the ingredients that I planned to use for the salad:


Ignore the carrot. I decided not to use it after trying the green mango and dressing. I used herbs from my garden, plus some nasturtium flowers for decoration. Use fresh store-bought herbs or minced herbs, if you don't grow them. I wouldn't use dried herbs for this one.



Green Mango Salad
Serves 4 as a side dish

2 green mangos, grated or julienned
2 spring onions, chopped
1 tablespoon of sugar (I used half palm and half white, but brown, all palm or all white would be good)
2 tablespoons of lime juice
1/2 - 1 tsp vegan balachan shrimp paste (Depending on your preferred saltiness. Replace with 1 tablespoon of soy sauce if you don't have balachan)
2 tablespoons of sweet chilli sauce
Small bunch of vietnamese mint (use mint if you don't have vietnamese mints), chopped
Small bunch coriander, chopped
2 tablespoons crushed peanuts
Nasturtium flowers or extra mint and coriander to garnish

1. Dissolve sugar in lime juice. I put them both in a cup in the microwave and heated them until the sugar dissolved.
2. Add the shrimp paste to the lime juice. Mix until dissolved.
3. Add sweet chilli sauce to dressing and set aside.
4. Mix the mango, spring onion and herbs well. Mound in a serving dish.
   
5. Pour dressing over salad.
6. Sprinkle nuts on centre of salad. Add garnish
7. Put salad in fridge for 1/2 hour to develop flavours. Serve.

I bought the vegan shrimp paste from the Cruelty Free Shop. It has the pungent scent and strong salty flavour of traditional shrimp paste. This was the first time that I used it. It worked very well. I have yet to try it in a Thai curry, but I suspect it will work very well.