I make a lot of vegetable or vegetable and fruit salads for lunch. And no matter how big these salads are, I generally get hungry in the afternoon for a substantive snack. To help curb this post-lunch snacking, I've decided to try to make my salads more substantive by adding in more beans, lentils, and tofu – also a great way to get in some extra protein.
Around the time of this new salad approach, I came across Milk Street's Garlicky Lentil and Parsley Salad with Feta, which also perfectly aligned with ingredients I had to use up.
This salad taught me a great way of prepping flavorful lentils that I can use on their own in other salads. The inclusion of cumin, cloves, and garlic makes for delicious lentils that in some ways don't even need the pickled onions, feta, and parsley.
While you make be thinking "great, I don't need to prep the rest of the recipe," hold on – the lightly pickled shallots (red onions in my case) and loads of parsley really make for a refreshing and complete meal or side. So whenever you have a bunch of parsley to use up, I'd highly recommend this recipe for a substantive and satisfying meal.
The modifications I made to the recipe were to halve the ingredients, cook the lentils for only 20 minutes (less time may make even more sense as lentils were a bit overcooked at this point), substituting red onion for the shallot, and eyeballing the amount of lemon juice used for the light onion pickling. Simple and yum!
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