This salad is lovely with shades of green and yellow: the colors of spring in our neck of the woods. It is a celebration of the hopeful days when fresh salad greens, sugar snaps, asparagus, and fragrant herbs are bountiful. Green and yellow pole or bush beans may not be ready to pick in our local gardens, but they’re being harvested not too far away. We think you’ll love the taste of fresh-picked salad greens topped with carefully blanched tender-crisp garden vegetables, plus a satisfying bit of protein, all dressed with a lively shallot vinaigrette. Food like this restores our faith in the good earth.
Serves 4
Time: 30 minutes
4 ounces salad greens, baby spinach, arugula, mesclun, or a combination (about 4 cups)
1 cup fresh parsley leaves, no stems
2 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon or dill (optional)
6 ounces green beans (a combination of green beans and yellow wax beans is pretty)
6 ounces sugar snap peas
12 asparagus spears
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1½ cups peeled and chopped shallots (about 8 ounces)
¼ cup rice vinegar
⅓ cup water
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons fresh tarragon leaves
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
4 or 5 quartered hard-boiled eggs, or 2 cups Simple Seasoned Tofu cubes (here, optional)
Rinse and dry the salad greens, parsley, and tarragon or dill, if using, and put into a serving bowl.
Bring a saucepan of salted water to a boil. Fill a large bowl with ice cubes and cold water and set close to the stovetop. Trim the beans and slice each diagonally into 2 or 3 pieces. When the water boils, blanch the beans until just tender and bright green, 3 to 5 minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon or strainer and plunge them into the bowl of ice water.
Trim the sugar snap peas and remove and discard the tough strings. Bring the water back to a boil and blanch the sugar snap peas for 2 to 3 minutes, then remove with a slotted spoon or strainer and add them to the ice water. Break off and discard the tough ends of the asparagus and slice the spears diagonally into pieces about 2 inches long.
Bring the water back to a boil and blanch the asparagus pieces for 3 minutes, then remove them with a slotted spoon or strainer and plunge into the ice water. When the blanched vegetables are cool, drain them.
Make the vinaigrette: Heat ¼ cup of the oil in a skillet or saucepan on medium heat. Add the shallots with a sprinkling of salt, cover, and cook, stirring a few times, until the shallots are translucent and soft, 3 to 5 minutes. Don’t allow them to brown. Put the cooked shallots, vinegar, water, mustard, tarragon, sugar, remaining 2 tablespoons oil, and salt into a blender. Whirl until smooth. Taste and add more salt if needed.
Arrange the vegetables on the salad greens and top with the hard-boiled eggs or tofu cubes, if using. Drizzle on some of the shallot vinaigrette and pass more at the table.
Serve with Spaghetti with Olives and Lemon or Pizza with Roasted Eggplant and Plum Tomatoes.
FREEKEH
Freekeh is a staple food in northern Africa and in Middle Eastern cuisines, especially in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria. It has also become extremely popular in Australia, where modern processing of freekeh originated. Freekeh is wheat that is harvested while green and moist, and then the grains are parched, roasted, dried, and rubbed to remove the chaff, leaving pale green kernels. Cracked freekeh is then broken into pieces.
Freekeh is not gluten-free, but because the grains are harvested when green, the gluten structure is slightly different from regular wheat, and the grain may lack an amino acid called gliadin, which acts as a trigger to gluten intolerance. Also, the grain is roasted, which denatures the gluten.
Because it’s harvested at an earlier stage of development, freekeh contains higher levels of fiber, protein, and certain minerals than more mature, typically processed wheat. And the process for making freekeh keeps the raw wheat’s high protein and mineral content largely intact. Freekeh is higher in fiber than brown rice and even quinoa. It also has a relatively low glycemic index compared to many other grains.