Going with the theme of the day; which is “no time to prepare food, but still needing to eat healthy food packed with nutrients”, I finally took the opportunity to try a restaurant I had been curious about for a long time. It is called Thrive, and specializes in a variety of salads, mixed grain bowls, and raw food entrées like a kelp noodle-based Thai veggie dish. Several meal delivery services in Seattle deliver food from Thrive, and I had mine delivered by Caviar. 

 

  
I tried the Juggernaut salad (with only quinoa, no red rice and the dressing on the side) and the Fresh Rolls. Each was big enough on its own for a small meal, but I ate the Fresh Rolls with Greek yogurt mixed with fruit to provide some protein.

This is what they actually looked like:   

 

As you see, they are very visually pretty and are both packed with lots of fresh veggies. As far as taste goes, I would definitely get the Juggernaut salad again, especially with my add-ins of extra shredded red cabbage, carrots and nutritional yeast. The fresh rolls looked great, but were almost entirely made up of shredded green cabbage, which is not the most flavorful vegetable, and one thin strip of carrot (though this does get extra points because it achieved the intended visual effect of looking like a piece of fish in an Asian fresh roll). Unfortunately the taste was a bit bland, and nutrition-wise, a variety of vegetables would have offered more benefit. I ended up having to use almost all of the included dressing, when I typically only need to use 1/3 to 1/2 of a sauce or dressing.

Next time I think I will try the Marinated Kale salad, with a couple of the high calorie toppings eliminated. My general rule of thumb to keep a salad from becoming too close to junk food is to choose 2-3 high calorie/delicious add-ins, such as dressing, cheese, dried fruit, nuts, avocado, fried toppings – and certainly maple coconut chips would fit in this category! Some of these ingredients are quite healthy (though not all of them are) but they are all high-calorie as well. I plan to order this with the walnuts, add avocado slices and maybe even use my own dressing. Lately I have been loving a quick dressing made by mixing my own lemon-garlic-tahini dressing with hummus, and that would be quite tasty on this dish!