Current dietary wisdom dictates that to mitigate all the indulgences of the holidays, January becomes the month of eating salad.
Everywhere you look, you’ll see recipes for satisfying salads for dinner, portable salads for lunch – even breakfast salads to start the day, if your need for bodily atonement runs that deep.
This is all good in theory, but in terms of seasonality, it can be challenging. What’s the best way to eat salad in winter when lettuces and other greens are at their wilting worst?
The solution is to cut back on the fragile leafy greens in your salad bowl, and ramp up vegetables of a more robust order.
Roots and squashes; mushrooms; and sturdy stalks and bulbs like celery, fennel and onions are viable, easy-to-find options. Roasting not only makes them sweet and wonderfully tender, it also gives you the perfect excuse to crank up the oven, something you’d be hard pressed to do for your average bowl of arugula.