Rainbow Wraps with Ginger Peanut (or Pumpkin Seed) Sauce

Whether you use raw greens (like collards or chard) or rice paper or seaweed for your ‘wraps’, these are a big hit with the kids for a few reasons:

• such a fun variety of colourful filling ingredients;
• kids can not only help with ingredient prep (choosing, rinsing, chopping, plating), but they can also choose their filling combinations; and
• any food that requires dipping is an automatic bonus for kids. Maybe not for clean up…

A bonus for adults: there is absolutely no cooking required – these are completely raw (unless you want cooked quinoa or vermicelli as a filling option).

These can also easily be made nut-free by subbing pumpkin or sunflower seed butter instead of nut butter.

In terms of variety, the sky’s the limit – cucumber, shredded beets, sprouts, avocado, mango, mint, basil…  My daughter has created (and proudly devoured) seaweed wraps filled with carrot sticks and sardines – perhaps even a few blueberries… experimentation at its finest.

Ingredients

Enough ‘wraps’ to feed yourself and/or your troops. We like to use, either:

• Collard greens, whole leaves, rinsed, dried and tough stems removed; or
• Swiss chard, whole leaves, rinsed, dried and tough stems removed; or
• Rice paper (usually found in the international section of the grocery store), soaked briefly in hot water; or
• Seaweed paper, no prep needed, but gives a sushi-esque taste to your wrap so these I save for my daughter :S

Filling options:

• raw shredded carrots and/or beets
• cucumber (I like to slice them long, julienne-style, but chop however you like)
• avocado, thinly sliced
• shredded cabbage
• bell peppers, thinly sliced
• snow peas, thinly sliced
• sprouts – alfalfa, mung bean, lentil, radish… anything goes!
• fresh herbs – mint, basil, parsley, rapini, carrot tops… anything goes!
• mango, thinly sliced
• edible flowers
• lettuce or other greens
• cooked and cooled quinoa, millet, buckwheat
• cooked and cooled vermicelli noodles

You can really put anything you like into these wraps, making your own unique creations.

Ginger Peanut/Seed Sauce

• 3/4 cups nut or seed butter (e.g. peanut, almond, sunflower seed or pumpkin seed butter work well)
• 1/4 cup maple syrup or 2 Tbsp coconut sugar
• 2 Tbsp fresh ginger root, shredded
• 1 Tbsp Bragg’s liquid amino or tamari
• Juice squeezed from 1 lemon or lime
• 1 jalapeno or other spicy pepper (or a dash of cayenne if you don’t have a fresh pepper)
• Optional: depending on the chosen nut/seed butter and your desired dipping consistency, you may want to add a few Tablespoons of coconut oil or rice/almond/coconut milk to thin it out

Place all of the above ingredients into a food processor (I use my Magic Bullet for smaller quantities like this recipe). Blend until smooth.

These wraps are pretty simple to put together, even for pre-schoolers (… though the end result may not be a perfectly symetrical cylinder shape, they are usually pretty proud of their creations 😉 The mess usually comes from eating them, more-so than preparing them 😉

A final reason I love to make these wraps is that the quantities don’t matter and left-overs actually help with meal-prep for later in the week. If you run out of wraps and are left with a whole pile of quinoa, julienned cucumber and lettuce shreds, toss it all in a bowl with some dressing (or left-over ginger nut dip!) – or save it and add it to tomorrow’s salad. And if you go overboard and make too much dipping sauce (as I often do on purpose), save left-over sauce to be added to a stir fry later in the week. Nothing wasted here!!!