Today’s salad is a great example of how recycling a recipe—keeping it intact, but with a few key tweaks—can pay off. It’s based off of my mustardy lentil sweet potato salad, which isn’t a green leafy salad so much as a spread of sorts, in the same way that chicken salad and egg salad are salads. I love that recipe. And it happens to be one of the more popular recipes on this blog.

I make that salad often enough to have noticed some of my own tendencies in preparing and serving it. I often serve it with toast, but I serve it over a bed of greens a lot, too, and often a side of crackers to help me scoop everything up. I like the addition of greens, especially arugula; it gives the salad some peppery brightness and crunch. I like it with other greens, too, including baby spinach and chopped romaine.

So lately, I’ve been experimenting with transforming this salad into more of a leafy salad. And I’ve been eating and enjoying it regularly enough that I figured it was worth sharing the reimagined recipe.

What I love here is that the greens give the salad lightness and freshness, but it retains its heartiness and heft. It’s earthy and substantial enough to be a winter salad, too, and since sweet potatoes are available for me year round, I’ll enjoy it in every season.

I also love that that the salad is good for serving with, or on toast, because when don’t I want an excuse to bake some bread? I usually make a full batch of the salad, store the leftovers (they keep pretty well for 2 days), and serve it with a slice of homemade bread or a couple whole grain crackers, if for no other reason than to scoop everything on the plate up.

The other new addition here is cherry tomatoes, which add a lovely bite of sweet juiciness. And I’ll take any opportunity at all to eat more tomatoes when they’re in season, which they finally are. Without further ado, the new-ish recipe.

In years past, I’ve felt that writing about food means constantly challenging myself to try, and post about, new combinations and new recipe concepts. This was a pretty good assumption in the past, especially since I started writing about food as a person who still had a lot of fear foods and unexplored culinary territories thanks to my eating disorder history.

Nowadays, as a recovered person with a solid love of food and a busy schedule, I appreciate echoes: recipes that can be reinvented in lots of ways, favorite combinations that I indulge whenever the craving hits. And I recognize how much of the joy of cooking can be found in nuances, in little adjustments between and among well-loved things.

I hope you’ll find something to love in the salad, too. It’s a little more time consuming than other salads I’ve been making this year, but the payoff is good.

Happy Tuesday, and I’ll be back around later this week with a satisfying new bowl!

xo

 

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