Mix and Match Recipes: Summer Salad Season
Mix and Match Recipes is a series on what we can achieve with our capsule pantry.
Executive summary: What have we been eating every week this summer? Bean salads + BBQ, it turns out.
I promise this intro eventually meanders around to the food:
One of the driving forces of our move back to California almost 4 years ago was being closer to family. For years, hubby and I had moved all around, with our careers and educations as the primary deciding factors. But now, with kids, having the grandparents nearby is 10x more important, both so our kids can get to know their extended families and so we can get a tiny bit of relief here and there. Our parents don’t live close enough to be of help on a day-to-day basis, but seeing them every month or two still beats living on the opposite coast from them.
While my parents have always been reticent to visit us in the Bay Area (preferring us to drive to them 2 hours away), they’ve made an exception this summer … not for us, to be truthful, but rather for my mom’s ballroom training (she’s been very serious about competing the last few years, and has started taking weekly lessons from a coach in San Jose). So all of a sudden, we’re seeing my parents once a week, and they always bring food with them (they are also serious about feeding us every time our paths cross). The last few weeks, we’ve been taking advantage of the grills at the communal clubhouse in our complex, because nothing says summer like BBQ! My parents prep the meat and haul it over in a cooler, and I’m responsible for the sides/veggies. There’s something about a green salad that just feels … incomplete? insubstantial? inadequate? to me, on its own at least. I find that the first thing my mind goes to is a “heavier”-feeling salad, like potato or bean. For some reason, I’ve never felt compelled to make a potato salad, maybe because I don’t know whether to classify it as a grain or a veggie nutritionally, so I set it aside in my indecision. But beans, to me, are a vegetable (don’t debate me here, the facts are irrelevant to my feelings), so I often reach for a can whenever we’re short a veggie on the table. There are three bean salads that I make, one with each of the three types of beans I keep in my capsule pantry (refresher here): black, white, and garbanzo.
This is the one I made most recently (#2 below: white bean salad).
#1: Black bean salad (aka my “Tex-Mex” style salad)
Core ingredients: black beans, cumin, cayenne pepper
Optional ingredients: diced onion (soaked for 15 minutes in white vinegar to remove the bite), tomato, cubed avocado, corn kernels, minced cilantro
Notes: I don’t always have every optional ingredient on hand, but I’ll aim to use at least two of them so the salad feels more substantial and has more contrasting flavors and textures (e.g., cherry/grape tomatoes for crunch and acidity, avocado for creaminess, corn for sweetness)
#2: White bean salad (aka my “Tuscan” style salad)
Core ingredients: white beans (usually cannellini), ribbons of prosciutto/salami/any deli meat, olive oil, black pepper
Optional ingredients: kidney beans, sundried tomato, diced onion (soaked in white vinegar), minced garlic, minced parsley, “French” or “Italian” herb mix, red pepper flakes
Notes: Sundried tomato is not in my usual capsule pantry list, but it really helps give this salad a distinguishing character. Neither are kidney beans, which add a nice contrasting color, but I could just double up on the white beans instead.
#3: Garbanzo bean salad (aka my “Mediterranean” style salad)
Core ingredients: chickpeas, cubed cucumber, minced parsley/mint/dill, white vinegar, olive oil, cumin, cayenne pepper, black pepper
Optional ingredients: diced onion (soaked in white vinegar), tomato, minced garlic
Notes: The herbs and spices take this salad from bland to grand, so don’t skimp! If I had easy access to za’atar, I’d definitely throw that in as well.
This is my all-star capsule pantry lineup of spices (plus olive oil) that I use almost exclusively, the primary exception being Asian cuisine (which I don’t have a salad for, because that would be blasphemy).
I don’t know how long the good times will last (i.e., how long my mom will keep taking ballroom lessons and therefore stopping by with food every week), but we just have to enjoy it while it does. Salads feel especially fitting for the summer and BBQs, but we eat them year round too. After all, you know what they say about beans being so healthy: they’re good for your heart and your … gut. ;-)