This is a chapter of mostly whole-grain salads, plus a few other items that you can keep in the fridge for days at a stretch. Most are probably best for lunch, although it’s hard to argue with a grain salad and some creamy hummus for a dinner without much fuss in the warmer months. Still, most of these dishes can be made on the weekend, saved in the fridge in sealable containers, and relished throughout the week for midday meals.
And that’s a great thing—because lunch all too frequently gets squeezed by all sorts of constraints, some of your own making, some not. You end up with a subpar sandwich on the run or a wilted salad at your desk. There’s little to savor in any of that.
Too bad. Eating is not only about sustenance. It’s fundamentally about pleasure. Yes, when we taste something wonderful, we sense the saliva in our mouths and the gurgle in our stomachs. But we might not know about other, less familiar reactions: chemicals in the brain that set us up for anticipation and fulfillment from our mouths to our stomachs.
Did you know you have as many neurons lining your digestive track as exist up in your head? Things don’t just taste good. They feel good—because of the release of a powerful neurotransmitter from your head to your stomach: dopamine, common across a huge spectrum of life, vertebrates to invertebrates. Among other things, it stimulates voluntary movement. See a fly, swat it, and thank dopamine. But it also sets up a reward-based pleasure principle in the digestive track—and all the way back up to the brain.
And how does this feel-good, warm-and-fuzzy dopamine make its appearance? First, it gets triggered by our personal, culinary histories. When we taste something delicious, we ping the brain’s hippocampus, our memory center. If we find tastes that match or are analogous to previously pleasurable ones, that ping sets off the Rube Goldberg cascade of chemicals that finally leads to dopamine all the way down the body.
Second, dopamine is triggered by chewing. Moving our jaws, we signal the vagus nerve to start firing. (It’s pronounced VAY-gus, as in Las Vegas.) That nerve is the single link between those up-top neurons and the ones in our digestive tracks. By chewing, we give the vagus nerve permission to release more of the pleasurable stuff.
Put simply, we eat because food feels good. If we ever intend to solve our overeating dilemmas in the modern world, it’s because we’ll embrace the very root of tasting and eating—that is, pleasure—and not run away from it. And here’s where whole grains play a crucial role: They offer big tastes and lots of chew in every spoonful. What’s more, every bite is laying down a good memory of better food for the years to come.
Still it’s sometimes hard to say “no” to that gummy, takeout sandwich—especially since our work week has expanded so dramatically. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average US blue-collar worker now puts in 47.1 hours per week and the average white-collar worker 53.2 hours. Those are 10-hour days—and that’s on average, with many reporting not-uncommon 70-hour work weeks. While other developed countries—France, Great Britain, Canada—lag behind the United States, they’re catching up, the pace ever increasing globally and locally at once.
No wonder the average amount of time Americans spent cooking fell so dramatically throughout the 20th century. In the 1930s, Americans spent almost 2½ hours a day preparing food at home. By the June Cleaver ’50s, we were down to an hour. Just at the turn of the millennium, the average American spent around 30 minutes a day preparing (or just unwrapping) all the food he, she, or the family consumed: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Voila: the gummy sandwich.
Not very long ago, some design experts were predicting that the kitchen would become a relic of the past, remodeled and fancified into uselessness, like the parlor that had morphed into the formal living room to be used only on the holidays.
How wrong they were! There’s been a startling reversal in the early years of the 21st century. Stats show that people are cooking at home again. And mostly on the weekends, rather than during the week. Time was, people ate out on Saturdays, called in on Sunday evenings, and used their kitchens the rest of the week. These days, our kitchens stay idle most of the week and go through a workout on the weekends.
So this chapter fuses what we need to eat with how we’re cooking—all in the service of hearty, tasty lunches or quick dinners from the fridge when time is short. Every dish here can be made in advance and squirreled away for several days: whole wheat salads with the likes of white beans, olives, sage, and tomatoes in the mix; rice salads that run from brown to wild; salads that use unusual grains like Job’s tears or black barley as well as the more familiar whole-grain bulgur wheat or quinoa. There are even a few dishes that aren’t salads at all: stuffed tomatoes, summer rolls, and the like.
Whole grains take to these preparations. The nuanced flavors don’t degrade when stored in the fridge the way those in other dishes can. Face it: Roast chicken is not so stellar 2 days later. The flavors have dulled; the skin, gone squishy. But grains hold up because they were designed to.
So whip up a couple of tasty salads when you’ve got some time. You’ll have meals all week. Sure, you may still eat it at your desk, but at least you won’t need to stop for that always-tempting-but-in-the-end-rarely-good slice of soft, mushy, cheese pizza. You’ll have chewed well and savored well. It’ll feel good all over your body.
In many ways, wheat is the backbone of this book. There are more recipes using wheat berries than recipes for any other grain; there are also more “Grain Swaps” that call for wheat berries than any other grain. And none of that counts the recipes for other wheat products like wheat flakes or whole-grain bulgur, some of which we’ve already seen in breakfast dishes and others we’ll get to in subsequent sections.
Wheat’s importance to this project is sort of strange, given that it’s actually the third most produced grain on the plant, just behind runner-up rice and far behind our champ, corn. You’d think one of those other grains would get top billing.
Then again, wheat’s dominance in our book is not so strange, given that the fates of humans and wheat have been linked for millennia. Some archeologists and prehistorians claim that wheat was the first thing humans ever domesticated—and that it in turn domesticated us, allowing us to give up the roam-and-kill lifestyle for the benefits of city living.
It’s a two-way street. Wheat is now dependent on us. These days, it bears no resemblance to its undomesticated kin, wild einkorn and wild emmer. These were scrawny competitors in the plant world, usually driven into poor clay soils on the edges of scrub-oak forests by far more aggressive weeds. Tasty but relatively wimpy, wheat saw its one chance with us, a species that finds not just sustenance but actual pleasure in its food.
So modern wheat—of the sort that gives us the full range of wheat berries, spelt to Kamut—evolved to depend on humans as much as we depend on it. Cultivated wheat cannot regenerate on its own. It needs us to gather its seeds and plant them. When a wheat farmer abandons his or her field, it does not continue to yield a crop. Left to its own devices, a wheat field will fall fallow, go to weeds, and eventually morph into a prairie or a new-growth forest. Modern wheat’s only method of reproduction is us, among the strongest competitors on the planet. Consider it a rare, healthy codependency. We call it the staff of life, both supporting us in bad times and becoming a symbol of the good times in those waving fields of amber grain. In turn, wheat needs us to survive into the next generation. No wonder wheat berries get the biggest share of these recipes.
In developing them, we put wheat berries on this continuum from most assertive to fairly mild: spelt berries—whole-grain farro—hard red winter wheat berries—Kamut—soft white spring wheat berries. If you want to morph our recipes by using one wheat berry in place of another, you might consider a similar continuum, adding bolder flavors to balance a more commanding grain, or taking the flavors down a notch so they don’t mask a milder choice.
Wheat’s predominance took over not only our recipe testing but our recipe tasting, too. We host a variety of groups in our New England home: lunches for book groups and the like. We live in a resort area, the Berkshires. Half the houses are owned by weekenders. Believe us, these people will show up whenever they hear there’s free food. Even for a discussion of Virginia Woolf! Which is how, on the Friday before Labor Day last year, we ended with double the usual contingent milling about our house. It was like a family reunion in Arkansas. We had to walk around asking, “Are you sure you’re supposed to be here?”
We were right in the middle of testing recipes for this chapter. We had bowls of wheat salads on the counter: spelt berries with tomatoes and white beans, Kamut with cauliflower and olives, a gazpacho-style wheat berry salad. Fortunately, in the face of throngs, we also had bowls of cooked, unadorned wheat berries in the fridge. In a flurry of mincing and dicing, we whipped these up into more choices. There’s something comforting about a bowl of cooked farro or spelt berries that you can toss into a hearty salad when crowds drop by. Let the good times roll!
There’s also something so summery, so satisfying about wheat berries of all stripes. No matter the season, their savory nuttiness pairs beautifully with bright, fresh flavors. You can celebrate the summer or perk up the winter.
You, too, can have such abundance with simple salads like these. Seal them in a container and they’ll keep in the fridge for days. And that’s pretty much the essence of this staff of life. And a great reason to celebrate our codependent relationship with this grain.
WHEAT BERRY SALAD WITH ZUCCHINI, BOILED LEMON, AND ALMONDS
SICILIAN-INSPIRED WHEAT BERRY AND TUNA SALAD
WHEAT BERRIES WITH FETA AND OLIVES
GAZPACHO-STYLE WHEAT BERRY SALAD
WHEAT BERRIES WITH OVEN-ROASTED TOMATOES AND FAVA BEANS
FARRO WITH NECTARINES, BASIL, AND TOASTED PINE NUTS
FARRO AND SMOKED CHICKEN SALAD WITH CARDAMOM AND CHUTNEY
KAMUT SALAD WITH CAULIFLOWER, OLIVES, AND RAISINS
DECONSTRUCTED KAMUT CAESAR SALAD