NJ SPICE

Farro Salad

Did you miss me? I somehow got an early-season flu so have been out of commission for nearly a week! My advice: Get your flu shot early, very early. I usually wait until mid or late October but next year I won’t.

I mentioned this salad in my recent post about my three-day cookathon, and wanted to expand on it. This is one of those dishes I can make a batch of and just enjoy any old time. One batch on the weekend and I’ve got a few days worth of lunches. I do like to give it a few minutes to return to room temperature once it’s been refrigerated. The recipe, from thekitchn.com, is here.

After I made it a couple times, I finally got the bright idea to look up “farro salad” in my personal Eat Your Books index (of the cookbooks I own), and found endless variations, such as with nectarines, grapefruit and mint, with preserved lemon, with tomatoes, mushrooms and feta, the list seems endless. I will surely try some of those too, now that I know how handy it is. This happens to me often, where I see a recipe online that appeals, and I discover I have so many variations of it already in my big ol’ cookbook library. Gotta spend more time with those books! (More on that soon; I am putting together a panel discussion about cookbooks at the Princeton Public Library for early December!)

I bought pre-cooked farro at Trader Joes for this. It’s parboiled, then bagged dry, and takes 10-12 minutes to cook, rather than more like 30 minutes. Either way is easy, just don’t overcook it, because to me the chewiness is a must, it adds substance to the dish. The eggplant that you roast with the red onions is so succulent, and the use of white balsamic vinegar gives the salad a fresh, perky flavor that I love. Great buffet dish, great to take to a potluck, and it’s vegan, much less vegetarian!