Category Archives: Salad

Bowl, Brunch, Farro, Grains, Lunch, pistachios, Pomegranate, Quick, Salad, Side dish, Vegan, Vegetarian

Roasted cauliflower and farro salad with pistachios and pomegranate

Roasted cauliflower and farro salad with pistachios and pomegranate on alickofsalt.com

Here’s a hearty salad that can be its own meal or serve as a side dish. It is a simplified version of a recipe from April Bloomfield’s cookbook ‘A Girl and Her Greens.
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The first time I made this, I steamed the cauliflower. I used to think that my least favorite part of cauliflower was what a horrible mess it made in my kitchen when I cut it. Turns out that I hate it steamed. While I was trying to figure out how a combination of things I like a lot on their own (cauliflower! farro! pistachios! pomegranate arils!) could make for such a disappointing dinner, my husband offered the following encouraging words: “It was as good as any other weird dish you’ve made.” It was the cauliflower’s fault.

The lesson here is, if you think you hate cauliflower, have you tried it roasted? There may be hope for you yet! It took a while to figure out how to roast cauliflower without overroasting it and therefore ruining a perfectly promising dish. The trick for me was getting the edges to brown while maintaining a teeny tiny bit of its natural crunchiness.

The dish reheats well so it makes for a great easy lunch or brunch companion. I usually reheat it by stir-frying it in a pan with a little bit of fat (olive oil or butter) and I love that the farro gets its shape and some more of its chewiness back. Some things to keep in mind for reheating: the pistachios will no longer be crunchy and the pomegranate arils will fade in color if you overcook them. If these are potential disappointments for you, withhold the pistachios and pomegranate arils when combining the salad, sprinkle them individually on each portion, and store any leftovers separately.

The recipe instructions assume you don’t have already have cooked farro on hand, but I think that actually this recipe would be even better if you fried the cooked farro before combining it with the rest of the ingredients. I have not tried this yet so I didn’t write it in to the instructions but if you make this, I hope you’ll try frying the cooked farro and let me know how it turned out!

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Brunch, Dinner, Lunch, Meats, potatoes, Quick, Salad, Sausage

Sausage and potato roast salad with arugula and shallots

Here’s a quick, weeknight friendly dinner to try out now that it’s fall and the oven is back in commission. This salad has a very complex taste for how few ingredients it combines and it is tasty with both fingerling and colorful mini potatoes.

The recipes this one is adapted from call for a lot more sausage and shallots. I’ve made this several times and tweaked the recipe with each iteration until I finally found a balance I liked with enough sausage to be filling but not too heavy and just a small amount of shallots, enough to add a little bit of sweetness. 1/2 sausage link per person is plenty for lunch or brunch and can be increased to 3/4 of a link for dinner (and the remaining sausage can be used as a pizza topping!) I use just one shallot per person, and I peel and slice it before I roast it so it can caramelize and crisp in the pan. I try to keep as much of the basal stem in tact as I can when I separate it from the roots so the shallot layers stay together when I slice it. I keep the shallots in for the same amount of time as the potatoes because I like them extra crispy. If they look too crispy for you, they can be removed before the final stir, as noted in the instructions.

The only decision I’m still on the fence about is how small to cut the sausage before roasting. Cutting them into 1″ pieces yields pieces large enough to slice into that stay tender inside whereas cutting them into 1/2″ pieces produces crispier and bite-sized pieces that can be more evenly distributed in the salad. For the salad in these pictures, the sausage is cut into 1/2″ pieces and I used 1/2 sausage link per person.

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Asparagus, Dinner, Leeks, Legumes, Lentils, Lunch, potatoes, Quick, Salad, Side salad, Vegan, Vegetarian

Warm potato salad with lentils, asparagus, and caramelized leeks

Warm potato salad with lentils, asparagus, and caramelized leeks

Salads make for great meals in the summer, especially ones that don’t require you to heat up your oven, like this one. Fingerling potatoes are still in season, and the colorful ones look great in this filling and accidentally-vegan salad. If you can’t find fingerling potatoes, new potatoes are also nice but really, any kind of potato works; just be sure to mind the cooking time. Some hints about modifications and serving the salad as a side can be found in the Tips section below.

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Dinner, Figs, Fruit, Grains, Lunch, Pomegranate, Quick, Quinoa, Salad, Vegan, Vegetarian

Baby kale autumn salad with figs and pomegranate

Baby kale autumn salad with figs and pomegranate

Here is a seasonal recipe combining the last of the summer fruit season with the beginning of the winter one. I really like the sweetness the ripe figs add to this salad but if you’re unlucky enough to live in a place where figs are no longer available, you can add some fig jam to the dressing or just skip the figs altogether.

The main sources of protein in this salad are the quinoa and pecans. I try to time it so that both the quinoa and the pecans are still warm by the time they go in the salad. We prep the fruit and vegetables while the quinoa is on the stove, the pecans go in to the oven just before the quinoa is ready to rest and we toss and dress the salad as the pecans cool.

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Chickpeas, Dinner, Legumes, Lunch, Quick, Salad, Vegan, Vegetarian

Crisped chickpeas and arugula salad

Crisped chickpeas and arugula salad

One of our quick, go-to meals when we’re feeling lazy is some version of this salad. This particular version is vegan. Its large amount of protein from the chickpeas and sunflower seed kernels should satisfy omnivores as well. We add just a simple dressing and we don’t add a lot of it. The cherry tomatoes, ripe avocado, and grated carrot and beet add a lot of flavor on their own.

We add a whole can of chickpeas because we never remember to use the rest of the chickpeas when we use only half. But it’s really quite a lot of chickpeas. If you soak your own or if you’re better at remembering to use the things that end up in your fridge, you could easily halve the amount in the recipe and still have a satisfying meal.

We prepare everything that goes in the salad while the oven is preheating and while the chickpeas are in the oven so the salad is pretty much ready to eat by the time the chickpeas are ready to come out of the oven.

This recipe, too, has in part been adapted from my cooking bible, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. The crisped chickpeas are adapted from the book and their recipe is also available on the Smitten Kitchen blog.

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