Week 1 - Diet Foods

New year, new 52 week cooking challenge! The first challenge for this year was all about diet foods. Since I've never really had the discipline to stick to any diets and there are so many that prohibit things I love to eat, I decided to just go for healthy clean eats and adapt a carrot and rye berry salad recipe from Serious Eats that I'd been eyeing for months.

Since I made this right after Christmas weekend, I didn't really have time to go searching for rye berries, as much as I wanted to try them for the first time. We still had our Costco bag of farro at home (I really wish they would sell this again), which seemed like a good substitute. Also, we looked at 3 or 4 different stores, but couldn't find any plain Marcona almonds, so I just left those out and used chickpeas instead. Not a real substitute for almonds, but better than nothing. For our adapted version of this recipe, I used:

- 1.5 cups of farro ($1)
- 2 bay leaves ($0.10)
- salt ($0.05)
- 6 medium carrots ($0.75)
- 1 can of chickpeas ($0.70)
- 2 spoonfuls of whole grain mustard ($0.14)
- 2 cloves of garlic ($0.06)
- 2 tsp (+ more to taste) of lemon juice ($0.10)
- 2 tsp (+ more to taste) of balsamic vinegar ($0.25)
- 3 tbsp olive oil ($0.60)
- 2 stalks of celery ($0.25)
- 1/2 red onion ($0.30)
- 1/2 bunch of cilantro ($0.50)
- freshly ground black pepper ($0.05)

For under $5, this made a giant bowl of farro salad, enough for a filling dinner that night plus leftovers for lunches. Eating vegan can be so friendly to your wallet sometimes.

Putting this salad together was pretty straightforward. With all my substitutions, I didn't follow the original recipe exactly, but what I did was:

- cook farro in one pot with 1 bay leaf and salt until tender (about half an hour), then drain and run under cold water
- peel carrots, add to a second pot with the other bay leaf and lots of water, bring to boil, then simmer until tender (I boiled them for too long, one fell apart), drain, cool, chop
- make dressing in large bowl: combine mustard, garlic, lemon juice, vinegar, olive oil
- add salad ingredients to bowl: chilled farro, chopped carrots, chickpeas (after draining and rinsing), chopped celery, slivered red onion, chopped cilantro
- mix together well and adjust seasoning as needed (I added more lemon juice and balsamic)

The salad was good. I love the texture of farro, in salads or anything else, and it's sturdy enough to work for a salad like this. The carrots were good, even if a touch too soft, and the celery was crisp and refreshing. The onions were a little sharp, so next time I would probably soak them in some cold water for a little bit before adding them to the salad. As for the dressing, it was good, but next time, I might add some extra mustard.

This was a really healthy way to kick off the new year of cooking challenges. Although I didn't think of this as fitting anything but a clean eating diet before making it, when looking back on it I realized that it scored well on the color diet, it was good for a vegan diet, and it was appropriate for a Meatless Monday diet. Overall, and more importantly for how I actually "diet," it was just healthy, full of whole grains and lots of vegetables. This was a great start to the challenge year!