To remember a successful salad is generally to remember a successful dinner; at all events, the perfect dinner necessarily includes the perfect salad.
George Ellwanger
While I don’t think Mr. Ellwanger is wrong when he refers to salad as being part of the perfect dinner, I think that is only true when you have a 3+ course meal. In fact, I’m a huge fan of just salad for dinner, or better yet, lunch.
“[Salad] freshens without enfeebling and fortifies without irritating.” ~ Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin Well, it’s been two months since I last posted a recipe and man, has it been a very eventful two months. To begin with, as any regular followers of this blog would know, I was planning to leave Korea and return to my native Ireland in August 2015. I had been planning to return to Ireland for about a month before heading off on the Camino in sunny Spain. The Camino is a very, very long walk and the route I was going to take was around 700km. I was going to have some friends join me at different points for a few days. After that, it was going to be a winter of study preparation in order to do a CELTA course in the spring, plenty of cooking, and tons of walking. Unfortunately, my sister’s death meant that I returned home two weeks early and all my plans got a little topsy turvy. The unexpectedness of her death and the amount of time it took to get her …
A couple of months before I moved to Korea, my nephew had his first birthday. At that time, my younger brother was living in Korea and sent home some traditional Korean clothes for my nephew to wear to celebrate his big day. Consequently, we had a Korean/Asian themed birthday party for him incorporating some Korean traditions and food. One of the traditions that Koreans do for a child’s first birthday is to display on a table several items including a spool of thread, a book and money. Each item means something different for the child’s future: money equals wealthy, thread equals like life, and books that they will be a great student. With my nephew, we didn’t have everything that we needed, so we substituted other items and gave them different meanings. It was great fun watching him picking different things up.
Black beans and soy beans are the cornerstones of longevity diets around the world. -Bobby Darin This last week was the second week of camp for me and it’s been a busy one. Teaching camp is a lot more work than normal day-to-day as I have to prepare a lot more material and put a different “teaching cap” on to make sure the kids have a lot of fun. I know my 3rd graders are having a blast but I’m not so sure about some of the older kids! Anyway, I’ve had to bring a lot more work home with me so I haven’t had much time to prepare food for dinner and lunches. Luckily, I came up with an amazing little salad that has been a lifesaver this week; it’s healthy, tasty, and best of all, assists with lowering cholesterol and improving digestion. Yay for legumes! The idea for this salad was thanks to a trip to Costco where I picked up a large jar of oil-packed, oven-dried organic Roma tomatoes and some avocados. …
Spoon in a Saucepan 