Still Feeling Peckish

 We brought a new pet into the house. Recently kid#2 and I went to Gardens By The Bay and after the walkabout, we could not resist going into the Gardens Shop. I absolutely adore plants and I’ve always dreamed of a herbarium on my balcony. The problem is that I was born with purple and not green thumbs. Most plants die with me, even cacti which are supposed to be ineffably hardy. Still, when we stumbled across a Venus fly trap plant, we couldn’t resist bringing it home.

Adopting a carnivorous plant wasn’t as straighforward as it seemed at the beginning. According to the Internet, Hub’s suggestion to feed it steak apparently would have killed the plant. Fortunately we have been having an ant infestation in the house and the plant has been reasonably happy and well fed. We had also visited a friend recently who gave us 2 large flying ants which we fed to the plant.

  
Feed me Seymour!

So at least for the past week or so the plant has been growing well and I am hopeful that it should beat the survival odds (maybe till Christmas?). It has actually put out new shoots and traps, which is pretty promising.

So I am rather carnivorous, a little like my little Venus fly trap. I do like a picture a friend tagged me on recently (with all the hoo ha on processed meats).

  
But although the rebel in me immediately went out to buy 2 packs of bacon after the WHO decreed processed meat as dangerous as cigarette smoking, there is a compliant part of me that keeps to really fresh and unprocessed fresh meat and vegetables, which is the reason for this salad recipe (look Ma, no bacon!).

I’ve made a lot of salads in my time and of late I’ve gotten really lazy and the salads I make are really bare bones with some greens and tomatoes thrown together with EVOO. But once in a while (usually when company comes) I will dig up a more complex and hearty salad recipe. I personally adore seafood – clams, mussels, shrimp, scallops…and I would be as happy as a pig in mud if I had seafood everyday. But notice that for this post I didn’t really claim it to be low carb. So for people wanting a truly low carb salad, please don’t eat the orange wedges in the salad – they are in there for color and also because I’m a frugal Chinese (that usually cooks everything from nose to tail) – since I was using orange peel in the poaching liquid, it made absolute sense to me to throw the orange into the salad. Also a warning that certain types of seafood is not really that low carb – cuttlefish and oysters and clams actually have way more carbs than fish, so be good and eat more of the greens than the seafood in this salad! Ok I confess that in making this salad I was more interested in being happy than healthy! 😝