My Dream WFH Salad

crunch crunch crunch crunch yum

In a flurry of if-you-build-it-they-will-come optimism, I made myself a salad bowl. Or rather, I continued making a large bowl that had acquired a dainty crack down its side. When it comes to ceramics I generally only take home the misfits, unless I’ve created a special project for myself; anything too beautiful that I keep is lost cash. I am trying to get over this obsession with profit, but I’m not there yet.

I have, however, arrived at a place where I am regularly eating salads for lunch. By regularly I mean once maybe twice a week, but still. A CSA summer meant that I regularly had greens to get through, and we all know how much I hate food waste. Salads re-entered the fold, and I ate them happily, even though sometimes I felt like I was just a pac-man with an assigned amount of stuff to chomp through before I got to the next level. Things changed when the cabbage started showing up in my bi-weekly bags.

My ideal salad is sturdy and crunchy, but not so fibrous that it feels like homework. A chopped broccoli salad, for example, needs a bunch of cheese and other fatty-soft things to counteract all that chomp. On the other side of the spectrum, something made exclusively with delicate soft leaves often leaves me wanting. When the cabbage arrived, I found my happiest medium: a mix of shredded cabbage and mixed greens, tossed in a tahini dressing and topped with a crunchy, almost-praline jumble of spiced sunflower seeds. I toss in some sort of protein, like (ideally) some cubed roasted tofu or (when I’m less prepared) an over-medium egg, snipped into pieces with my kitchen shears. The new bowl was the perfect size: you could use it as a serving bowl for some sort of dinner party vegetable side, but it’s big enough to hold an enormous salad for one.

The whole mess reminds me of one of my favorite genres of restaurant: a crunchy, homey vegan restaurant that offers piles of brown rice and tempeh and greens smothered in some sort of nutritional yeast-heavy gravy. Maybe you go for the tempeh reuben. On the table with the forks and salt and sugar they’ve also got industrial-size containers of Braggs liquid aminos and nutritional yeast. There is usually something called a “Buddha bowl” on the menu. It’s post-macrobiotic, pre-impossible burger, it’s heaven. My favorite is Rosetta’s Kitchen in Asheville, NC, where I used to make pilgrimages when I was living in Charlotte and still eating fully vegan. It’s high-key comfort food, with little effort to “replace” meat and instead embrace the crunchy American vegan food traditions we all know and love. I’m about to head off to a short writing residency outside Asheville, and I’ve already planned a little side trip for some peanut butter-baked tofu and a slice of chocolate cake.

The salad I’ve been making offers a similar type of comfort: it’s full of vegetables, sure, but the tahini dressing makes it rich and never-boring, and the crunchies on top are an updated version of the candied pecans you used to get on those goat cheese salads in the ‘90s. They’re cooked on the stovetop with olive oil, maple syrup, salt, and smoked paprika, and while I absolutely hate when people make this comparison, while they’re cooking the smoke and maple set something off in my nose and make me think someone is cooking bacon.

The salad is endlessly adaptable, and like all good salads, it’s more suggestion than prescription. Add whatever protein you like: marinated and roasted tempeh would be great here; so, too, would pulled rotisserie chicken. If you don’t have sunflower seeds, use pumpkin seeds or chop up some nuts. Add any herbs or additional vegetables you have around: this is the perfect venue for carrot tops, basil, parsley, scallions, roasted sweet potatoes, pickled beets. A bit of crumbled coat cheese on top would be luxe. The most important thing to keep in mind is the mix of crunchy greens and soft greens: you want the delicate stuff to caress your cheek with its silky touch and you want the crunchy stuff to make you feel like you could climb a mountain. Does that make sense? I don’t know, you make the salad and tell me.

Crunchy Crunchy Lunch Salad

Makes one big salad, plus extra dressing and topping