One of the items in the swag bag was a cookbook by blogger-turn-cookbook author Michael Natkin.
Michael's book has the same title as his blog: Herbivoracious. Try saying that ten times ;)
The cover of the book is absolutely stunning. The book itself contains 150 vegetarian recipes.
Vegetarian?
Yes, even though I love meat and seafood, I don't shy away from making completely vegetarian recipes. After all, variety is the spice of life.
Last weekend, when I was low on inspiration, I decided to look through Michael's book and ended up bookmarking Latin American Green Lentil Salad recipe.
The salad seemed hardy because of the use of French green lentils, but light and fun because of the addition of cucumbers, radishes and avocado.
I made a few changes to the recipe when making it: instead of using queso fresco I used feta. Instead of using parsley and mint, I used cilantro. And finally, I used red skinned potatoes, which actually took quite a bit longer to cook than the book suggested. Also, I did not really measure anything: I just guesstimated. That's how I cook. But for your sake, I'll copy the recipe with specific quantities below.
Slightly adapted from Michael Natkin's Herbivoracious
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups French green lentils
2-3 red skinned potatoes, cubed
3 tablespoons olive oil, plus additional for the potatoes
kosher salt
1/2 medium cucumber, diced {the book suggested you peel and seed the cucumber first}
6 radishes, thinly sliced
1/2 small red onion, thinly sliced {the book suggested you finely dice them}
2 hand fulls cilantro, chopped
juice of 1 lemon
1/2 cup feta
ground pepper
1 avocado, sliced
Directions {I changed some of the wording to reflect what I did.}
1. Preheat the oven to 400F.
2. Rinse the lentils and pick them over for stones and debris. Pace them in a saucepan, cover with plenty of water, bring to a boil, cover, lower the heat and simmer until the lentils are tender but not falling apart.
3. Meanwhile, drizzled the potatoes with olive oil, season with salt and pepper and roast until they are tender. This can take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes.
4. Once the lentils are cooked, drain and cool them.
There are two different ways to serve this salad.
In the first method, I added lentils to a shallow plate and then positioned the rest of the ingredients on top in pretty rows, similar to Salad Nicoise.
In the second method, I combined everything other than feta and avocado in a bowl, then layered slided avocado on top and sprinkled with feta. Clearly, you can choose whichever presentation looks best to you.
Do you have a favorite vegetarian side dish? What is it?
Have a great weekend!
3 comments:
Nice. I can't wait to check out this book. Going to the launch party for it tomorrow!
This looks so pretty! I love the layering of the ingredients.
Lovely fresh recipe, almost like a creative Cobb salad
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