Heading for the Hills

Summer begins this weekend and it’s time for me to head for the hills, or more specifically, the mountains. As I mentioned in my anniversary post a couple of weeks ago, in the last two years I have published over 350 posts, and that’s a lot of words, and food, and cooking and clean-up. It’s time for a vacation, and time to refresh my mind, so I will be signing off for two weeks, while I head to the mountains. The Chef’s Last Diet will be back June 29th, with a fresh perspective, so please stay tuned!

A week ago I published the recipe for a great salad of quinoa and lentils, and unsure about the amount of lentils I’d need I made the whole bag. It turned out I only needed half the lentils, leaving me with four cups of cooked lentils. Coincidentally a friend posted an article from Epicurious on using lentils to make great lunches, and my sister was visiting and she recommended a recipe from one of our go-to cookbooks, The Frog Commissary Cookbook . It felt like national lentil week! There is an annual Lentil Festival  in Pullman, WA, that I won’t be attending but I guess I had my own last week.

The lentil salad I ended up making was incredibly simple and got me through many meals this week. I used different add-ons, and I recommend you try your own. On Monday I added some crumbled feta and halved grape tomatoes, on Tuesday I used some leftover steak sliced thin, on Wednesday I went back to my feta & tomato combo, on Thursday I had the salad for dinner with some grilled shrimp, a nice hot/cold contrast. Each time I tossed in fresh baby arugula, and I advise that if you’re not going to eat it all at one meal, you add the arugula as you go. No need to add extra dressing.

So while I’ll be heading for the hills, I’ll be thinking about you, about food, and about The Chef’s Last Diet. I’ll  see you in two weeks, and in the meantime, talk to me about your favorite summer foods.

Lentil Salad

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Serves	6-8
Prep time	20 minutes
Dietary	Vegan, Vegetarian
Meal type	Lunch, Main Dish, Salad, Side Dish
Misc	Serve Cold

Ingredients

• 4 cups Cooked Lentils
• 1/2 red onion (chopped into 1/4)
• 1 box baby arugula (about 3.5 oz.)
• 1 lemon (juiced)
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

Note

If you're not going to eat all the salad at one meal, add arugula just to the salad you expect to eat.

To cook lentils, use 2 cups of liquid (water or stock) for each cup of lentils. Bring liquid to a boil, add lentils, lower heat and simmer 30 minutes. Cool lentils before assembling salad.

Directions

Step 1

Make dressing by putting lemon juice, and mustard into a bowl Slowly whisk oil into the lemon-mustard mixture to from an emulsion You can make this is a blender or food processor. If you do use the same technique of slowly adding the oil while the machine running

Step 2

Mix the lentils, onion and arugula together and mix with dressing Taste and add salt and pepper to taste