Salads using Mayonnaise

I have been eating two salads lately that have mayonnaise as part of the salad dressing. One of them is a pasta salad that you would not even realize that mayo was part of the dressing and the other is something I picked up from VeganYumYum.

The pasta salad is called Main Dish Delish Summer Pasta Salad and I found it up Vegweb. Here I am having it with Lentil Rice Salad for a quick and easy lunch. Even though one cannot tell from looking at it, the dressing on the pasta salad does have mayo in it. Of course, with only ¼ of a cup with 8 oz of vinaigrette, you really can’t expect to see the mayo in the salad anyway. By the way, this salad makes a ton and if you are looking for something to bring to work or to a picnic, this would be the perfect thing. No one would ever suspect that it is vegan.

This second salad is something that I saw over at Lolo’s blog, VeganYumYum. It basically is a BLT salad; with raw kale, tempeh bacon (I used mushrooms to make my bacon) and cherry tomatoes. When I saw this, it looked intriguing and I was wondering if my homemade, nontraditional mayo would work. I cut the kale in as thin strips as possible and thoroughly massaged the dressing on them at least 6 hours before eating dinner. By dinner time, the kale was wilted and “cooked” in the dressing. The mushroom bacon is just thinly sliced Portobello mushroom caps, marinated in VWAV tempeh bacon marinade and then fried in a dry pan till crisp. The tomatoes are grape tomatoes, since I like those better than cherry tomatoes. All in all it was quite good, considering that this is most unique thing I have ever eaten.

So as you can see, even a homemade mayo works quite well, in many recipes.