Hello, friends and family!
It’s been many months since I hit send on a Dinner Diary email. What the heck have I been up to? Logging some serious playground hours with my hilarious and silly two-year-old, working full-time as the general manager at Busy Bee Organics (the cutest little cafe and meal delivery service in Jersey City), and zooming back and forth on my mint-green adult kick scooter, which I highly recommend as a mode of transportation. Generally just living a busy, happy, whimsical life beyond my wildest dreams.
You’ll be glad to know I still eat dinner, and sometimes I even make it! Remember how I used to plan and execute elaborate meals regularly? Well. These days I’m much more likely to throw together something easy (and I mean easy easy, like a turkey sandwich or a bowl of cereal, not like “easy weeknight lasagna” easy). Do I still think about Dinner Diary? Naturally. Do I sometimes recall longingly the days when I had the free time not only to plan and cook five to seven dinners a week, but also to photograph them for you and wax lyrical about their nutritional merits, their origin stories, their emotional resonance? Of course I do.
And that’s why, when my wife Anne suggested I dust off the old newsletter to tell you all about this salad I made for dinner tonight, I was taken by the idea. I can just write about one dinner! That’s still a dinner diary! So step into my diary and let me tell you about this salad I made for dinner tonight, which we are calling:
Seven Star Salad.
I’ve been inspired lately by all the delicious, fresh, fiber-packed salads we serve at Busy Bee, particularly the shaved Brussels sprouts salad, and the rainbow slaw salad, a medley of vibrant produce (broccoli, carrots, cabbage, mango, red onion) finely chopped and tossed in a lemon tahini dressing. So I’ve been daydreaming about getting back into my Big Salad habit of yesteryear. Today I just went for it, breezing through the Stop & Shop and gathering up whatever produce called to me, a kind of supermarket sweep. I chose things based on convenience (pre-cut broccoli florets!), wild promises of extreme nutrition (vertically farmed kale microgreens!) and deliciousness (a small and certainly overpriced bag of honey toasted almonds!)
I must have done something right, because after eating this salad, Anne spontaneously awarded it seven stars.
Which I confidently assumed meant seven out of five stars, but I’m realizing it could just as easily mean seven out of ten stars, which would take it from extra credit territory to a barely passing grade. But based on the congratulatory tone of Anne’s voice, and the lack of salad left in the bowl, I’m going with my original assumption. Seven out of five stars!
I also realized that there were seven main ingredients in the salad, seven stars of the show, if you will.
The seven stars of this salad:
finely chopped raw broccoli
crisp green and red baby leaf lettuce
kale microgreens from Aerofarms
sliced baby carrots
grape tomatoes
plain old chickpeas from a can
and some leftover shaved Brussels sprout salad (from Busy Bee)
A gorgeous cast of characters, each adding their various textures, flavors and impressive fiber content to the whole. But if this salad is a film (just stay with me), these seven stars would be nothing without the director.
And the director of this salad-film? (No, not me. I’m the producer in this analogy, I think.) The dressing. It is hands down the most delicious salad dressing I have ever made in my life. I got the recipe from Gathered Nutrition, where blogger Mia Swinehart calls it Copycat SweetGreen Spicy Cashew Dressing. I’ve never had the spicy cashew dressing from SweetGreen, so I can’t speak to the accuracy of this copycat recipe, but wow oh wow do I like it. It’s an unusually long list of ingredients for a salad dressing, a tablespoon of this here, a teaspoon of that there, so you might find yourself asking, “Is it worth it?” I’m here to tell you it’s worth it. The cashews, the sesame oil, the lime juice, the nutritional yeast, the maple syrup… every ingredient plays its part, combining sweet, salty, sour, and umami into a luxurious, creamy, tangy dressing which skillfully coats the ensemble cast of veggies and coaxes out their best performance. Is this a weird metaphor? Yes. Does fortune favor the bold? Also yes.
It feels great to feel excited about cooking again, and to be sharing my thoughts here with you again.
One more fun thing:
You know how I love, love, love me some beans? For their health benefits, their cost effectiveness, their versatility, their flavor? At some point in my bean research, I came across Buttermilk Bean, a cool collective of organic bean farmers in upstate New York. This year I ordered their spring share box, which promised “a diverse dry bean bounty organically grown in the Finger Lakes.” A diverse dry bean bounty? Be still my heart!
The spring share box ships this week, which means this bean freak will soon have some cool new legumes to cook and write about. I feel inspired already.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to hit reply and tell me what you’re excited about these days!
XO,
Hannah
P.S. I went digging through my archives to find when I first wrote about being a “bean freak” and it turns out that it was exactly one year ago today! Which was my first day of training at Busy Bee. Thanks for being with me on this journey.
Very nice to see your stories again. Love your attitude and writing. Always a pleasure to read.