Arugula, couscous and lentil salad with lemon viniagrette

 

 

There's that happy moment each summer where we finally graduate from just picking a couple of ripe cherry tomatoes each night to that blissful time where you have enough to actually cook something with them. Still not a ton, but enough for this recipe.

Arugula salad with lemon vinaigrette
Adapted from Ellen Edgar Ogden’s “The Complete Kitchen Garden,” one of my favorite cookbooks I think I’ll cook from. It’s not reality of course, any more than the lovely, inspiring sketches of kitchen garden plans are in this book. Kitchen gardens are often messy and usually photographed from strategic angles to mitigate that fact, with heavy focus on paths and trellises. The spacing guides she gives are realistic, however, and there are helpful plant lists. It always amazes me how much and how little you can pack into a 4-foot-square raised bed, depending on what it is you're trying to grow.

Ingredients
½ cup olive oil
¼ cup fresh lemon juice
¼ cup red wine vinegar
1½ tablespoons Dijon mustard
3 garlic cloves, minced
½ cup whole wheat couscous or grande couscous, cooked according to package instructions and cooled
½ cup dry green or black lentils
6 scallions, chopped
1 cucumber, cut into ½-inch pieces
1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved
4 cups arugula leaves, torn if large
½ cup crumbled feta

Method
Combine olive oil, lemon juice, vinegar, mustard and garlic. Set aside.

In a medium saucepan, cover lentils with enough water to cover by 1 inch and simmer over medium heat until just tender, about 15 minutes. (You want to avoid the mushable stage or they won’t stand up to being mixed in the salad.) Drain and cool.*

Combine cooled couscous and lentils in a large bowl. Toss with 2 to 3 tablespoons of the vinaigrette. When ready to serve, add the scallions, cucumber, cherry tomatoes and arugula and toss to blend. Add more vinaigrette as needed. (You will have leftover vinaigrette. You won’t mind.) Toss crumbled feta on top.

Rating: This recipe is late July in a bowl: Take everything fresh in the garden or market and turn it into a really nice lunch along with a few pantry staples. There's enough crunch from the cucumber and greens to offset the soft heftiness of the couscous and lentils.The bright vinaigrette didn't seem to need salt, plus the salad gets a dose of salt from the feta. I'm a big arugula fan, but if you're among those who aren't, mixed greens could work as well, probably the sturdier the better. We paired this with mixed berries for a very sustaining lunch, but it could also work well as a dinner side dish paired with grilled chicken or fish. Dave's take: This is all a happy medley.

 * Or, if you want to cheat, which I did: They sell black lentils in those 90-second cook-in-the-microwave packs. It put me over the edge to actually making the dish, rather than just thinking I would.