Happy Monday! I hope everyone is ready for a great week ahead. For me, the cold winter weather can be very gloomy and unmotivating but a good meal with bright flavors can really help combat that. And that’s what I’m sharing with you today.

Today’s post is the Miso Cabbage Slaw from the cookbook Thug Kitchen 101. This is such a colorful mix of vegetables and then it has a delicious dressing made with miso which is an ingredient I’ve never actually cooked with or eaten before.

Starting with the salad part, it is a combination of red and green cabbage, carrots, green onion and cilantro. So right there you can see that there is a lot of colours going on and also a lot of crunch which is very important in coleslaw or any salad in general. I really like the freshness of the green onion and cilantro just really brightens everything up.

And now let’s get into this dressing because it was a good one. It’s made with miso paste which like I said I’ve never had before. This recipe calls for yellow or sweet miso (I used white – not sure the exact difference) and it was actually a brown colour which I wasn’t expecting. But of course, I tried it on its own and it really just tasted like extra fermented soy sauce. It had a nice umami quality to it. So the miso gets mixed with some lemon juice, rice vinegar, maple syrup, Dijon mustard, diced shallot, sesame oil and olive oil. It was a little acidic on its own but it worked really well once you tossed it with all the cabbage and carrots because those are so sweet so it was perfectly balanced.

This was just such a good coleslaw, this whole bowl got eaten up in one dinner. I really like the richness of sesame oil it’s not overpowering but it is a really nice touch. Last thing is that the recipe actually calls for toasted almonds and I put them on but I forgot to put them on for the picture. But they were a really nice extra crunch and nice toasty flavour too.

I really liked this recipe and maybe I’ll try making more things with miso paste. What are your favorite things to use it in?