Napa Cabbage Salad

There is this local teriyaki restaurant that has the best teriyaki chicken bowl I have ever had.  It has grilled chicken with this yummy sticky teriyaki sauce and then this cabbage salad with crunchy ramen noodles...ah...it is SO good.  And I am pretty sure when I calculated the Weight Watchers points it was the better part of my points for the entire day.  Kind of sad.

I have been meaning to try and replicate at least the flavor a little bit for awhile but never get around to buying the napa cabbage because they are so stinkin' big I thought I would never use it all.  But, this last week there was a napa cabbage in our CSA box and since we are splitting it three ways I ended up with half of the cabbage which was just perfect.  I searched on Allrecipes and on Pinterest and found a lot of recipes that were highly rated...and loaded with oil.  Again, kind of sad.

Fine...they off on my own I would have to go to create something that would work.  And what I came up with is now the second best teriyaki chicken bowl I have ever had.  Here is the recipe for the cabbage salad that I came up with...

Ingredients
2 tablespoons slivered almonds
1 teaspoon olive oil
2 cups of chopped napa cabbage (chopped up 1/2 of a whole cabbage and still have 4 cups left)
1/2 cup of shredded carrot
1 sliced green onion (I only used the green part because I wanted just the hint of flavor.)
1 teaspoon of canola oil
1 1/2 teaspoons of soy sauce
1 1/2 teaspoons of rice wine vinegar

Directions
1. Toast the slivered almonds in the olive oil and set aside.  (You don't have to use oil to toast almonds but I am always looking for ways that I can get my healthy oils in without having to taste them.)
2. Combine the shredded napa cabbage, shredded carrot and green onion.
3. In an air tight container, add the canola oil, soy sauce and rice wine vinegar.  Shake container until mixed well and then pour over the salad and lightly toss.
4.  Add the almonds on top of the salad.

All of the recipes I looked at called for WAY more oil and some sugar in the dressing.  I know that the restaurant version has a ton of oil because the sticky teriyaki sauce actually slides off the cabbage.  Kind of gross when I write it out like that.

I suppose you could have this all buy itself and I probably will at some point, but I had in my refrigerator leftover grilled teriyaki chicken.  I also had Trader Joe's brown rice.  So, I sliced up the chicken and heated it up with the rice.  Tossed it together with my cabbage salad...so yummy!

I didn't have any sticky teriyaki sauce which I thought I was going to really missed but didn't.  The only teriyaki flavor came from the chicken, but the dressing on the cabbage was really good and light that I think the sticky teriyaki sauce would be way to heavy.

And with that recipe and after thoughts, I think there has been a change in the rankings.  The best teriyaki chicken bowl in town is right here!