It’s September, arguably the month with the best weather New York City has to offer all year. The skies are blue, the air is a little crisp and it’s pleasant to be both indoors AND outdoors. September is the gateway to fall cooking, and also the gateway to project cooking. Finally, we can turn our ovens on without taking our pants off.
Last week I had a really profound experience lunching at St. John in London. The restaurant, established by Fergus Henderson in 1994, is a city institution and unapologetic homage to British food, which is often overlooked and underrated. It was a life-changing meal for me for a few reasons. First, because it was a place I’d been itching to visit for a really long time, and it lived up to the hype. Second, because it forced me to think about how we eat meat- the parts we consider prime and the parts we waste (I ordered ox heart and it was absolutely delicious, very lightly seasoned, sliced paper-thin and served with chips). And lastly, because it made me appreciate the beauty of simple food.
If you’d told me when I started this blog that at eventually I’d have not one but two lentil salad recipes on offer I’d have had a good laugh. Lentils, as I’ve said before, have not always been and still often are not, my cup of tea. But this is the second lentil salad recipe I’ve come across that really won me over. The first was this fantastic French-style salad from the venerable David Lebivitz. This one is a more eclectic recipe from April Bloomfield, whose restaurants The Spotted Pig and Salvation Taco I love, and whose cookbook A Girl and Her Pig is a delicious and trustworthy ode to meat. The irony that I picked a lentil salad from that book is not lost on me.
I’m not going to even try to give this recipe some of-the-moment context, because there just isn’t any. It’s not going to be on your Christmas or Hanukkah tables. You’re not going to serve it at your New Year’s Eve party. It’s not super healthy in anticipation of resolutions that will soon be broken during the greyest days of February. It’s just a really awesome dish that I make almost every other week, sometimes for lunch at work (I eat it on a generous pile of greens) and sometimes as a side to something like roast chicken. And I’ve been meaning to share it with you for awhile, so here it goes.
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