Winter Summer Salad

It's the middle of winter, but for reasons I can't explain, all I want to eat are salads. Not stews or soups or chili or other "cold weather" foods. Just salads. I've made 3 salads in 3 days. Not exactly food to keep you warm when the wind chill is in the 20s, but it made me happy!

Tonight's salad definitely made me think of summer. Filled with cucumbers and corn and celery, it was super light and refreshing, exactly what I was looking for. I started off with this recipe for a chilled black bean feta cucumber salad from the kitchn and adapted it for what we had and like. The ingredients I used were:

- 2 cans of black beans, drained and rinsed ($1.33)

- 1 can of corn, drained ($0.89)

- 1 hothouse cucumber, finely diced ($1.69)

- torn leaves from 1/2 bunch of cilantro ($0.50)

- 1/2 bunch of celery, finely chopped ($0.50)

- 1 bunch of green onions, chopped ($0.70)

- 1.5 cups of crumbled feta ($2)

- 1/4 cup of lime juice ($0.60)

- 1/3 cup of red wine vinegar ($0.50)

- salt, pepper, and cumin to taste ($0.10)

The cost for the salad came in just under $9, which isn't cheap for just one component of dinner, but it made quite a lot of food. Even though we ate a lot (too much?) of it, we still had a small bowl of leftover salad after dinner, so it was worth it. You would never get this much salad for the price outside.

Making the salad is really easy. You mix together all the non-dressing ingredients (black beans, corn, cucumber, celery, scallions, cilantro, feta) in a large bowl, then add the lime juice and red wine vinegar, and then season it with salt, pepper, and cumin. After that, you're supposed to chill it for at least an hour. I didn't have that type of time though (prepping took me a while, definitely not the 15 minutes in the original post, and didn't want to start eating at 10 pm), so I chilled it for about 30-40 minutes, as long as it took to pre-heat the oven and bake the chicken tenders we ate with it. Would longer fridge time have been better? Maybe, but it was just fine with less time.

Overall, we really liked this salad and would definitely make it again. Next time, I think maybe I would add more cumin, as we both thought that we could taste a hint of it but it was very subtle. We love cumin so we wouldn't mind it having a bit of a stronger presence. Originally, I was going to use half of a red onion, but the half we had in the fridge smelled a little odd, so we ditched it instead and I used more green onions. We think we prefer it this way and would probably not go for the red onion next time either. A didn't read the recipe in advance but thought that maybe adding a chopped jalapeño pepper would also be good. That was one of the suggestions in the recipe, but I forgot to buy one, so maybe will do that next time. This was really great and perfect for my salad craving!

P.S. This works great as a salad, but it also makes for a delicious dip with some corn chip dippers.