Mediterranean Arugula Salad with Green Olives, Farro, and Crispy Baked Chicken Strips

With a bunch of leftover olives after last week's tapenade, I ended up tossing together a salad mid-week that was worthy of recreating for the blog.  I love salty, briny olives, but discovered that these mild green olives were great for bulking up a salad without a salt overload.  Between the olives, farro, and chicken, the salad is hefty enough for a winter meal without feeling like a brick in your stomach.  

Another thing I really like about this salad is that it keeps well overnight.  Even after being dressed and tossed, it won't seem limp and soggy the next day.  So, it's great for premade lunches.  I even warmed it up in the microwave for just a bit and it tasted great transformed into a warm winter arugula salad.

I'll leave you with that, considering I have a final paper due Tuesday that I haven't even started.  Good luck to me. 

Roasted Squash and Pomegranate Farro Salad

When it comes to squash I'm a real idiot.  It's not an ingredient that I was familiar with growing up, so I just know nothing about them.  Sure, I've eaten squash prepared for me before, but they were more or less Halloween decorations until now (they are real pretty).

I was impressed by the variety and extremely low cost of the squash on display at the grocery store across the street, so I bought four types and went about conducting a taste test.  I sliced and roasted a standard green acorn squash, a white acorn squash, a gold acorn squash, and a butternut squash.  What I was going to do with all this roasted squash was a complete mystery, but I figured it would transform into some sort of soup and some sort of salad.  Mostly, I was curious about how different they would actually taste from one another.

Turns out, they all taste (and smell) like squash.  I know that seems silly, but I don't know how else to put it.  However, they did vary in sweetness.  By far the most important distinction was texture.  The green acorn definitely held its firmness much better than the others, so it's perfect for salads.  The others, in their creaminess or pastiness, made their way into a three-squash soup (coming later this week to the blog).  The green acorn was the mid-range of sweetness, which I also found preferable for a salad with other sweet ingredients (like pomegranate seeds). 

So, despite the lack of alarming or remarkable results, all the squash was quite tasty.  I was particularly pleased that the seeds were easy to flavor, toast, and incorporate into this salad.  It's a very balanced dish when the spices of the squash seeds and sweetness of the pomegranate seeds make their way into the same bite.  The seeds are also a nice textural contrast to the soft farro and squash.  The balance of flavors meant that I didn't have to season the final dish at all, so it stayed low-sodium and low-fat.  It's a rather perfect fall salad, so go grab some squash.

three grain salad

Let me start by saying this: I'm not a doctor.  Or a dietician.  But as a casual observer, it would seem that carbs are the enemy of man.  I see more and more students needing gluten-free diets every year for serious health reasons, and I also note that many a friend has had lots of success loosing weight on the paleo diet.  In the case of the former, I hope medical science soon explains the cause of rising gluten intolerance, but I have a bone to pick with the latter (pun intended!).  Not with the paleo diet, per se, but with the (mis)use of the terms "paleo" and "caveman."

Again, I'm not a doctor or a dietician,  but I know as a historian that our paleolithic, pre-agricultural, "caveman" ancestors ate tons of carbs.  Any anthropologist can tell you that hunting alone isn't a reliable and efficient enough source of energy to support human groups.  Perhaps we forget that gathering of grains has always been central to human survival because we imagine grain growing in perfect rows of industrially fertilized farmland, but grains are wild and can be gathered as plentifully (if not more so) than fruits and vegetables.  Grains and carbs aren't the enemy of human genetics: in and of themselves they don't make you plump (although carbs in the form of twinkies, do).  Eating grains and carbs and not burning off the complex carbohydrates that provide you with really efficient little packages of energy will make you plump.  We're programmed to store this energy that is meant to eventually be expended.  So if you were more plump eating carbs than on your paleo diet, it just meant that your body was working exactly the way it was programmed to work: saving your padded ass in the case of drought or famine.  It's just our lifestyles that have changed (decline in drought, famine, and general energy expenditure). 
Really, I'm not trying to bash my paleo friends at all.  Your fit, post-industrial bodies are getting all the energy and simple carbs needed for your lean physique.  Chances are, you're in better shape than me.  All I'm saying is that this salad full of three unrefined, whole grains is just as "paleo" as steak.  (Maybe more).

So go eat like a caveman and make this three grain salad recipe.  It's perfect for finding yourself with random and smallish amounts of barley, farro, wheatberries, quinoa, millet, or whatever whole grains you might have around.  Special thanks to Mandy over there at Lady & Pups (my favorite food blog of many months now) for her arugula pesto inspiration.

Greek Lemon Soup and Brussel Sprouts

I had some left over dill and farro from yesterday's meal, and some eggs I needed to use, so I made one of my favorite greek dishes: avgolomeno.  I used the guidelines from this "Egg and Lemon Soup," but used farro instead of brown rice.   It went well with the roasted brussel sprouts with balsamic glaze.

There's even an upper body workout for tonight.

Mediterranean Turkey Burger

Mediterranean Turkey Burger with Farro Tabbouleh, Tzatziki, and Spiced Chickpeas

There are a lot of components here, but the burger, tzatziki, and chickpeas all go very well together.  If you're not into the bitter flavor of tabbouleh, skip it and stuff everything else in a pita.