Recipe lab: Spiced chickpea and lentil salad that keeps for days | Canada Voices

Welcome to The Globe’s Recipe Lab, where food culture reporter Dakshana Bascaramurty explores what makes recipes work well.

The objective

An easy, nutritious and filling salad for lunch that will keep for several days in the fridge

There is no meal I put less effort into than the weekday work-from-home lunch. When my husband returns from the office, he’ll ask – in a very loaded way – what I ate for lunch. The answer is often too embarrassing to share. Sometimes it’s a banana muffin, or a handful of crackers and a nub of aged cheddar, or a slice of leftover birthday cake I scarfed down at 2:30 p.m. when I remembered I’d not eaten since breakfast. Making dinner for my family takes enough out of me that I don’t want to waste my energy reserves on lunch, too.

Once every few months I’ll put some effort into a salad or grain bowl with tuna or halloumi and think, “Wow, my life would be so much better if I did this every day” but the next day I’m back to eating the half bagel my daughter left on her breakfast plate. To steer me away from this habit, I wanted a hearty, nourishing salad that was easy to prepare, would make enough for leftovers for a few days and still taste as good on day four as it did on day one.

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I turned to Hetty Lui McKinnon’s newest vegetarian cookbook, Linger, which is full of salads, many of which eat like a meal. Admittedly, several recipes looked appealing but seemed too high-effort, had intimidatingly long ingredient lists, or contained delicate greens I worried would turn mushy and unappetizing after a few days in the fridge. But then I flipped to her Spiced Chickpea and Lentil Salad. The inspiration for this salad was a memorable bowl of harira, a North African soup, McKinnon enjoyed at Shuka Restaurant in New York. As she consumed it, the wheels started turning in her brain: these simple ingredients and pantry staples could easily be converted into a salad.

The recipe had a manageable ingredient list and simple method. As a bonus, McKinnon ends the headnote for the recipe with this promise: “This salad keeps well, too, and the flavours will continue to deepen over time.” I was sold.

The process

There are maybe 10 minutes of active time for this recipe. McKinnon calls for a pound of tomatoes cut into 3 cm to 4 cm chunks and that’s where I slightly strayed. When it’s not summertime, I exclusively buy greenhouse-grown cherry or grape tomatoes, which have a much more appealing texture and flavour than imported romas or beefsteaks (a bonus is you can just throw them in the oven whole, saving you the trouble of chopping them. I used two 255 g containers).

You prep your veggies, toss them in some oil and spices and then roast them. When you sprinkle on the spices, you will think there’s way too much, but they are meant to flavour the lentils and chickpeas you add later on.

After 25 minutes, everything came out of the oven looking and smelling delectable: The cherry tomatoes had burst, the tips of sliced onion had taken on a delicious char and the celery had developed a beautiful golden hue from the turmeric.

I love that this recipe calls for canned chickpeas and lentils, which you just need to rinse and dump onto your tray of roasted vegetables. Legume fanatics will tell you that beans and lentils taste way better when you use the dry ones and cook them from scratch, but who has time for that?

The result

This salad was everything I wanted: low effort, full of flavour and hearty (with plenty of protein and fibre).

One thing it does well is textural diversity: soft lentils, tomatoes and onions; firm chickpeas; crunchy celery and pistachios; and tender fresh herbs. No bite is boring.

I don’t care much for celery and rarely buy it, but it was the surprise standout. Its time in the oven had removed its fibrousness, but it still had a nice bite to it. “I love this idea of taking an ingredient that people really underestimate and really showing you this ingredient can carry a dish,” McKinnon told me over Zoom.

Roasting the vegetables supercharged them with flavour, which, as McKinnon promised, continued to build as the week went on.

“This one in particular can sit around for a bit and the flavours do deepen, they meld,” McKinnon said.

The first time I made this, I found it to be too lemony so I opted for the juice of just one lemon the second time. I also chopped up way more than just “a handful” of herbs and kept them prepped in the fridge so I could add them fresh – alongside the chopped pistachios – every day.

I don’t love to eat leftovers more than once. Surprisingly, even on day four I wasn’t sick of this salad! I found ways to zhuzh it up as the week progressed to keep it interesting: One day, I found some limp grapes in the fridge that nobody wanted to eat raw so I tossed them in olive oil and put them in the oven to roast for 10 minutes and threw them into the salad to add a sweet element. Another day, I quickly fried an egg and added it on top of the microwaved salad.

McKinnon once had a business selling salads and learned many tricks to reinvent the leftovers. This one would taste great in a pita, she suggested, or covered in broth and turned into a soup.

A warning: the recipe makes a ton – enough that I shared some with a friend who had come over for a co-working date, and my husband, who packed a large portion for his own lunch a few days. If you’re only preparing it for yourself, cut the recipe in half.

There was a day this week when my toddler was home sick with a stomach bug and I spent many hours on the couch sending e-mails and Slack messages while I held my son in my arms. The sink was full of breakfast dishes, I was exhausted and when I was able to put him down for a nap, I was so grateful to have leftovers of this salad to power me through the rest of the work day.