Brian and I do now not have a propensity to take holidays, the manner most human beings reflect onconsideration on the word. Aside from spending each week or so collectively with his circle of relatives at Christmas, we most effective take the bizarre lengthy weekend here and there to visit buddies or visit a Morris dance occasion. This leaves Brian with masses of greater excursion days every year that he can not cash in or bring over. So as an opportunity, while the 12 months begins drawing to a near and it's apparent he won't want all the ones excursion days for something sudden, he starts offevolved taking Fridays off, basically giving himself a gaggle of prolonged weekends in a row.
This weekend became the number one of those, so we took the opportunity to visit our neighborhood farmers' market together. Brian usually could no longer get to go to this, whilst you don't forget that it is open simplest on Fridays from 11am to five:30pm; if he took off early sufficient on a Friday, he must swing by way of and capture the very tail cease of it, but it's now not as lots a laugh as heading over within the center of the day and taking the time to look the whole lot. So we walked down collectively, browsed the booths, and purchased a couple of factors we wanted?A dozen eggs, some apples?After which tried to determine out if there has been whatever else we favored. We already had lots of butternut squash and green beans out of our very very own lawn, but one fall crop we have in no manner been capable of expand well is spinach, so I advised picking up a bunch of that. Initially I turned into taking into consideration putting it right into a pasta dish we make that calls for wilted spinach or arugula, dried cranberries, and almonds, but Brian jogged my memory that we were out of dried cranberries. Rather than make a special journey to buy more, we determined to get the spinach, take it home, after which browse thru Mark Bittman for thoughts on what to do with it.
Brian seemed up
As salads go, this one was pretty tasty. The flavors of lemon and spinach play well together, and the juicy lemon chunks, chewy quinoa, and crunchy poppy seeds give it an interesting blend of textures (though those pesky little seeds also have a tendency to stick in your teeth). However, I must admit that even with all that protein-rich quinoa, it wasn't really hearty enough to make a meal of on its own. We ended up supplementing it with some leftover Butternut Squash Pizza with Sage, and the salad plus a slice of that was about the right amount for a satisfying dinner. I imagine this salad would also pair well with any simple protein dish, such as baked chicken or broiled fish. Or maybe you could make a meal out of it just by adding a fairly hearty bread.
So will we be making it again? Well, maybe. The snag is that, as we discovered at the farmers' market, fresh spinach—even in season—can be pretty pricey, and we've never had any luck at growing it ourselves. So although we both liked this salad, we probably didn't like it enough to pony up three bucks for a bunch of spinach just to make it. However, if we happened to buy a fairly big bunch of spinach for another recipe—like the pasta dish, or Spinach with Raisins and Walnuts—and had some left over, a suitably scaled version of this recipe could be a good way to use it up without having to buy any special ingredients.
