easy salad – In Good Taste

Quinoa Salad with Tomato and Corn

Maris Callahan — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 17:00:51 +0000

Quinoa was a mystery to me until less than a year ago, as was the idea of a quinoa salad. I didn’t even know how to say the word. Keen-wah! I just thought it was one of those super health foods that you had to be a super health nut to eat, and therefore I wasn’t really interested. I know, that’s bad. I do try to live a pretty healthy lifestyle, but I also try not to take it to the extreme. Maybe it’s because I think it would be too easy to get obsessed with it all. Maybe its because I think the exceptionally nutritious stuff might not taste as good. Maybe I don’t really want to think about it when I’m trying to maneuver my way through a barbecue bacon cheeseburger. Someone get this girl some help. Enter quinoa, the mystery seed. Not quite a grain, not quite a cereal (it’s actually classified as a pseudo-cereal), but quite healthy indeed. It’s a complete protein source (which means it has a balanced set of amino acids that are essential for us), it’s high in fiber, calcium and iron, and it’s gluten-free. It seems that quinoa is kind of an […]

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Pear Salad with Bacon, Gorgonzola & Toasted Walnuts

Maris Callahan — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Last week, I made dinner for a boy. I made pasta deliciousness and a pear salad with bacon and gorgonzola because boys like bacon. I say that with tongue in cheek because they’re not really still boys at 28. (Or are they? Married ladies, you tell me). I made dinner for a date and this is the part where I’m going to come clean and confess something. Despite the fact that my ideal day includes spending six hours in the kitchen with a thin film of flour coating my shirt, and despite the fact that I publish a website where I write recipes, I had not one freaking clue what I was going to cook until the night before dinner, when I stood in Trader Joe’s staring at the shopping list I’d haphazardly jotted down at 7:30 a.m. as though it was penned in Greek. And I don’t understand Greek. When you’re cooking with someone new, particularly when it’s someone who knows that you write a website about cooking, you might find yourself feeling a little bit oh, pressured to make a good meal. When you’ve claimed over drinks that you’d like to one day attend culinary school, it goes without […]

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Fruit, Nut and Goat Cheese Salad

Maris Callahan — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:01:48 +0000

When I was in elementary school, I didn’t worry about my weight or count calories. If I had, I have no doubt that the summers would have been my healthiest season of the year. Of course, I wasn’t making fruit, nut and goat cheese salad in elementary school, so we can all agree that things are different now. Summers once meant playing kickball on balmy evenings and eating ripe peaches, plums and nectarines for dessert, but now, summer means iced coffee, sweating on the subway and doing everything possible not to use my oven when it’s 87 degrees. Under these circumstances (and because I can’t squeeze a grill onto my too-tiny balcony) it’s easy to reach for chips and salsa and call it dinner. True, there are some nights where a hunk of Brie and some whole-grain crackers might seem like a well-balanced meal, but to afford that occasional indulgence, I like to fill the rest of my summer nights with crisp, healthy salads with produce fresh from the farm stand. Before I share my favorite, simple salad for a busy summer weeknight, there are a few things you should know so you can make your own healthy salad in what […]

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