Debi Simons 
Hello everyone! Watch for the name and design of these blogposts to change sometime over the next few weeks. You’ll start seeing “Respect Food Roles” as the title of the blog and the header will change to something food-related. I’m excited about the new content that I’ll be publishing. So don’t be freaked out if things look different soon. I’ll tell you exactly when the change will take place so you’ll know what to look for.
Folks, I have to tell you that this salad, made from items I had on hand and in some cases was trying to use up, is so seriously delicious that I’ve eaten it for my past three lunches straight. Today I used up the last of the dressing and thus the run has come to an end at least for now, but I plan to keep it in rotation for the future. It has (mostly) healthful ingredients and is a true one-dish meal, with lots of vegetables and good protein from peanuts. If you care about such things, it’s also vegetarian. In fact, it’s actually vegan except for the dressing. Here’s what’s in it:
A good example of strong, sharp flavors, a lovely main-dish salad made from items I had on hand. Yes, I work from home and so could take the time to assemble this on the spot, but it could easily be adapted to taking to work: all the non-lettuce, non-crouton items mixed with the dressing, with the lettuce in one baggie and the croutons in another, all tucked inside a lidded plastic bowl that could wait inside the fridge until lunchtime and then be mixed together. This is sort of halfway between a Greek salad and a salade Niçoise. I was watching a Greek cooking show last night and realized that I could put something very similar together:
I try to keep politics off of this blog (but you can head over to Intentional Conservative or my personal Facebook page to read what I have to say on the current state of affairs). I will just explain here that I got acquainted with Tom Nichols when I first started reading about the upcoming election in the spring/summer of 2016. He showed up in this article on The Federalist Blog (which is not the same as The Federalist Society, btw). Wow, I thought, What clarity, and what courage. I’ve been following him ever since. He suspended his blog about a year ago and he writes very few articles these days, but man! Whenever he does so I am so on it. I also periodically go onto his Twitter account when I feel the need for a blast of fresh air and common sense. He’s one of those people who gets attacked from all sides, so he must be doing something right—right?
My husband and I went on a trip this past weekend to Albuquerque NM to see visit the Hot Air Balloon Fiesta. Here’s what went wrong in the first 18 hours or so:
1. We realized that we’d hit a stretch along I-25 in northern New Mexico where there weren’t any gas stations, and our little Honda FIT has only a 10-gallon gas tank. We’d been watching for a gas station but hadn’t seen any for some time. Suddenly we realized that the gas gauge was telling us we were in trouble. Where was the nearest gas station? Turned out it was 21 miles back the way we’d come. How had we missed it? Did we really need
The remainder of a small head of Napa cabbage, washed and chopped
Part of a red pepper, sliced
A few shreds of red onion
Chopped peanuts
Peanut/lime dressing (scroll down on this website page to get to the dressing recipe)
Some leftover baked salmon from the night before
Lots of vegetables and protein from the peanuts and salmon
Filling and delicious!
Maybe you can relate to this scenario:
You’re ready to start on a rather tedious job, such as sanding the trim around a patio door. This trim had to be added on the spot by the installer because the door ended up being the wrong size and he had to fill in the sides with whatever wood was at hand, which was some extremely rough and knotty stuff. It’s not that big of a job, and you know in your heart of hearts that you just
Well! Recently on the Happier podcast Liz mentioned that she had just read a fascinating book and she was buttonholing everyone she knows and insisting that they read it too. It sounded so good that I figured maybe I should take a look, especially since Liz is in the midst of producing a new TV series and barely has time to breathe. If she read it, well, it must be worth a look, I thought. My new month’s Audible credit was in place, so I decided to go ahead and use that. Wow. I was absolutely entranced and stayed so to the very end. The audiobook is voiced by a great reader, by the way.
I said in a recent post that I was planning to scale back on my regular what’s-going-on-with-my-life posts and invest my time in projects that I hope will actually make a difference to my readers. One such is a set of videos on various topics concerning healthy eating. I also said that I might start some once-in-awhile posts about “what I ate today.” This is the first of those. They won’t be on any kind of regular schedule; they’ll just show up when I think a specific meal is particularly good and easy to make. (I remembered as I was writing this that I did include a picture and recipe for a lunchtime salad several years ago in connection with a memoir by the chef Nora Pouillon. Scroll down to the bottom of that post for that material.)
So, several weeks ago I put together one of my four-times-a-season retreat breakfasts for the wonderful, wonderful choir to which I belong. (Be sure to get your tickets now.) I had actually done a pretty good job of getting things done ahead of time, making up my chile-corn-cheese casseroles the night before and also the cranberry-orange rolls from Smitten Kitchen. (Mine didn’t have glaze–too sweet.) I had loaded up the car with supplies the night before also, a task I usually postpone until the frantic morning of the event. Really, as I look back on the whole thing I don’t see any particular reason for me to have been at all frazzled. I think that perhaps I didn’t get on the road quite as early as I meant to, but even that’s a little doubtful.
