Salad "Goat in the Garden"

This bright vitamin salad "Goat in the Garden" is ideal for a festive table. Its name apparently comes from the large number of fresh vegetables on the plate.

There are many options for preparing this dish, where the set of vegetable palette changes, and the meat component is replaced with sausage, cooked pork, or ham. But the main principle remains not to mix the salad before serving, otherwise the potato chips, which are an essential part of it, will get soggy, and the entire colorful "bed" will turn into mush.

Yield: 6 servings.

Cooking time: 40 minutes.

Caloric value: 198 kcal per 100 grams of the dish.

Ingredients

• fresh cucumbers – 200 g;
• white cabbage – 250 g;
• carrot – 200 g;
• beetroot – 200 g;
• pork meat – 300 g;
• thick mayonnaise – 180 g;
• garlic – 3 cloves;
• potato chips – 50 g;
• salt – 0.5 tsp;
• white sugar – 0.5 tsp;
• apple vinegar 6% – 0.5 tbsp;
• odorless vegetable oil – 2-3 tbsp (for frying).

Preparation

1. Prepare the ingredients for the salad "Goat in the Garden". Wash all the vegetables thoroughly, peel the root vegetables. White cabbage can be replaced with Peking cabbage (in this case, it won’t need to be pickled). Any meat will do – beef, chicken, turkey.

2. Cut the meat into thin not too long strips.

3. Fry them in the heated oil until cooked. This will take about 4 minutes (the thinner the cutting, the less time will be needed for frying).

4. Shred the cabbage into very thin strips.

5. Now it needs to be pickled a little. For this, add sugar and salt.

6. Then pour in the vinegar.

7. Mash the cabbage well with your hands while mixing it, so that the marinade ingredients are evenly distributed throughout the volume, which will noticeably decrease after this procedure.

8. Grate the carrot into long strips using a Korean carrot grater. If the root vegetable is very juicy, there is no need to marinate it.

9. Grate the beetroot in a similar manner (it is also quite juicy).

10. Cut the cucumbers first into elongated circles, and then into thin strips.

11. Prepare the dressing – combine the mayonnaise (it’s better if it is homemade) with the garlic pressed through a garlic press. A small amount of it will not be too noticeable in the salad, but the garlic addition will enhance and amplify the taste of all the vegetables.

12. Now it's time to assemble the salad. For this, it’s better to take a dish with low sides and arrange all the prepared vegetables and chips in a circle, leaving space in the center for the meat.

13. Fill the center with the fried meat pieces.

14. Place two tablespoons of the garlic-mayonnaise dressing as dividing strips between the sectors of vegetables.

Before serving, the salad "Goat in the Garden" is not mixed. During the laying out into portioned plates, it can be mixed, but there is another, more interesting option – leave everything as it is, and guests will take the part of the salad they like best. This way, the dish will maintain its structure, won’t get soggy, and will remain bright until the very end.