Kicky Avocado Dressing

On Sunday night, I headed to my first vegan potluck in Sacramento for a presentation by Jed Soliz of Team Veg. I played it safe taking a huge spinach meal salad with kidney beans and my avocado ranch dressing, but had a blast sampling many unique dishes other vegans brought including a curry couscous, Indian spiced potato casserole and gluten free chocolate peanut butter brownies.

There was a lot of chaos on my plate and it was delicious. The finale was a creamy pumpkin “cheese” cake with a sweet tofu frosting, very creative!

Then we got a great presentation by Jed about Team Veg and a little history on how he became a vegan athlete with an impressive amount of race wins and featured articles. He talked about balancing training with his full time job and balancing his energy, something I still struggle with and trying to figure out how I could fit in training for a full marathon. And the mission of Team Veg to represent vegan athletes in races and support athletes looking to move to a vegan diet. Some interesting points from his presentation include:

• He eats 3+ bananas a day because it’s a super food for endurance athletes.
• Proper nutrition for performance is key, stick to mostly whole plant foods.
• He recommended a low fat plant based diet with lots of good carbohydrates.
• He also recommended some supplements too include such as Vega products and MSM (methylsulfonylmethane), basically organic sulfur that has possibly wonderful effects for anti-aging.
• Include super foods in diet such as goji berries, raw chocolate (done!), and algae which the group agreed that Vitamineral Green is the best and safest source for.
• Training recommendation using the 10% mileage increase weekly and taking a recovery week every 4 weeks cutting mileage in half.
• Getting fitted for proper footwear at a running shoe store which I have yet to do.

It was another great vegan meetup meeting new vegans and hearing a lot of interesting conversation and views from laid back vegans to extreme health conscious ones. I like to think I’m somewhere in between. But after such a decadent dinner plate at the potluck, I decided to go for a huge salad last night and created a kicky new avocado dressing to go with it.

It’s a simple ingredient list that comes together fast.

And turns into creamy goodness with kick.

It coated a simple tempeh spinach salad nicely with flare.

The dressing has a little kick, but it’s not too spicy and has a nice tang from the dill and lemon juice.