So this weekend, when thinking of food to prepare for the week, I remembered this great recipe that was in this artsy cookbook my mom had. It was a recipe for a kind of bean salad. Robin made the salad for me one time and ended up keeping the cookbook (sorry Mom!) and I think my mom bought another one.
I really liked this salad, and I was thinking of calling Robin and/or my mom and asking if they had this book and would look up the recipe when I realized...um, you don't really need a recipe to make a salad with beans and cilantro in it. It's not rocket surgery.
So I got some ingredients and mixed up the following in a giant bowl:
2 cans of black beans, well rinsed
2 cans of corn, ditto (though I wished I had only used one can when I saw how much it was)
3 very good tomatoes, diced
2 avocados, cut into chunks *
1 small onion, chopped up pretty fine
1/2 of a cilantro bunch, diced to within an inch of its life
1 T olive oil
several splashes of lemon juice
salt, cumin (probably not enough to make a difference), & pepper
It didn't taste like anything right after I made it, of course, but after day in the fridge, it was pretty fantastic and exactly what I had hoped it would be (good in exactly the way I remember that recipe being good). It would probably also be good, and a little spicier, if you diced up a fresh jalapeno pretty finely and put that in there.
I ended up with about 10 cups of the stuff. I brought a 4-cup container to work to have as snacks, and the 6-cup container is at home. My boss wanted to try it, so I brought her about 1-1/2 cups yesterday, and she liked it a lot. (She said, "See, I could be a vegetarian if it was like this. This has flavor." Obviously she has not had much vegetarian food!)
(* I diced the avocados by splitting them in half and removing the pits, as one does, and then scoring each half down to the skin with a steak-type knife, in a criss-cross pattern. Then when I scooped it out with a spoon, it came out in little chunks.)
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5 comments:
I remember that salad but can't remember what book it came out of. Anyway there are lots of recipes on the internet for it and yours looks pretty close. Have you tried using soybeans in salads. They're pretty yummy. Also quinoa is a great grain. I get all my ideas from the deli section at WFM.
PS-- Now that you've confessed to the cookbook will you fess up to breaking my adorable Christmas cat
plate that I got from Neiman Marcus. It was hanging on the wall in the kitchen on Wroxton. One day it was there the next it was gone.
I think the cookbook was called something like "Still Life with Menu."
I honestly don't remember anything about the cat plate. Given the evidence you present, it seems likely that I broke it, but I can't remember anything about it.
Oh, and I haven't tried soybeans in salads, but I've had them plain or with salt or in stir-fries, and I haven't really liked them. I mean, I can eat them, but they don't do anything for me.
Quinoa...hmm.
It's pronounced keen-wah. I usually buy a box with seasonings already in it. I think the one I like is tomato basil. It would be better to buy it plain and use it in a salad. It's one of the healthiest grains (although not really a grain) Here is a nice web site about it: chetday.com/quinoa.html
I still have a bag of quinoa that I bought at Whole Foods with the best of intentions but haven't managed to do anything with. This is a good reminder that I need to try it in something.
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