All I want to eat these days is salad. Maybe it’s because I’m still making up for all those lost vegetables while I was nibbling peanut butter and apples on my camping trip. More likely it’s because it’s been a long winter of squash and potatoes and I’m excited about fresh greens.
When I come home from the farmers’ market, I like to toss baby greens with the barest of dressings: extra-virgin olive oil, lemon juice, freshly-ground black pepper, parmesan. But when those greens have run out and I need to supplement with organic spinach from the store, I like stronger flavors, like the ones in this Asian Spinach Salad from Bon Appetit.
The dressing is nothing revelatory, just olive oil, sugar, rice vinegar and soy sauce. It’s the topping — toasted ramen noodles, almonds and sesame seeds — that makes this dish so good. I wouldn’t buy ramen noodles for any other reason, given that they’re full of things I can’t pronounce and don’t believe in, but given the small amount of them you actually eat in this salad (and how delicious they are in it) I choose to include them. Just make sure to throw that flavoring packet straight in the trash.
If you make the recipe, I suggest using 4 or 5 tablespoons of olive oil instead of the recommended 8 (for a total of 3 or 4 in the dressing, plus extra for toasting the noodles). I also cut back the sugar from 3 tablespoons to 2. And I avoid the green onions altogether, since raw onions of any sort tend to overpower a dish. (Not to mention that health issue I wrote about earlier.) Lastly, the directions call for toasting the noodles, nuts and sesame seeds together, but the sesame seeds get done before the noodles so it’s better to add the seeds halfway through.
Click here for the recipe for Asian Spinach Salad.
“So what’s the deal with arugula?” 
