Couscous salad & Lentil salad

Here are two salads we had recently. They're made with things that we usually eat hot: couscous and lentils. Here, they're chilled and delicious in salad form...


This is Lemon couscous salad with macadamia nuts. I recently found the recipe in Ginny Callan's Horn of the Moon Cookbook. (It is a vegetarian cookbook--from the Montpelier, Vermont restaurant--that I have been using for years, despite its lack of photographs and my claim that I must have pictures in my cookbooks.)

As usual, I don't like to post other people's recipes cuz it's not my intellectual property. But I'll recap the ingredients: whole wheat couscous, macadamia nuts, cherry tomatoes, kale sauteed with garlic and dill, diced celery, parsley, all dressed with lemon juice and olive oil. We were shocked at how good this was--maybe it's those high-calorie macadamia nuts that hide in the couscous. The flavors were great and the different textures pleasing. We definitely had seconds. (One note: the original recipe calls for broccoli, but we used kale. Afterward we couldn't even picture it with broccoli because the kale seemed so perfect.)


Here's a Simple Lentil Salad from The Nourishing Gourmet. This is yummy--cute Puy lentils with cucumber, orange pepper and basil tossed in a garlic-kissed vinaigrette. I usually get boring brown lentils and I am loving the tiny, soft French ones. The Nourishing Gourmet also suggests adding feta, and I can see this being good with any number of other veggies: zucchini confetti, chunks of tomatoes, thin pieces of radish, maybe even some sauteed greens like the couscous salad.