Recipe of the Month: Quinoa Salad with Lemon, Spinach, and Poppy Seeds

Brian and I don't tend to take vacations, the way most people think of the word. Aside from spending a week or so with his family at Christmas, we only take the odd long weekend here and there to visit friends or go to a Morris dance event. This leaves Brian with a lot of extra vacation days every year that he can't cash in or carry over. So instead, when the year starts drawing to a close and it's apparent he won't need all those vacation days for something unexpected, he starts taking Fridays off, basically giving himself a bunch of long weekends in a row.

This weekend was the first of these, so we took the opportunity to go to our local farmers' market together. Brian usually doesn't get to go to this, since it's open only on Fridays from 11am to 5:30pm; if he took off early enough on a Friday, he could swing by and catch the very tail end of it, but that's not as much fun as heading over in the middle of the day and taking the time to see everything. So we walked down together, browsed the booths, and bought a couple of things we needed—a dozen eggs, some apples—and then tried to figure out if there was anything else we wanted. We already had plenty of butternut squash and green beans out of our own garden, but one fall crop we've never been able to grow properly is spinach, so I suggested picking up a bunch of that. Initially I was thinking of putting it into a pasta dish we make that calls for wilted spinach or arugula, dried cranberries, and almonds, but Brian reminded me that we were out of dried cranberries. Rather than make a special trip to buy more, we decided to get the spinach, take it home, and then browse through Mark Bittman for ideas on what to do with it.

Brian looked up "spinach" in the index and hit on a recipe that looked like it could hardly miss: Quinoa Salad with Lemon, Spinach, and Poppy Seeds. And that title is pretty much the entire ingredient list, aside from a simple lemon vinaigrette dressing (olive oil, lemon, salt, and "plenty of pepper"). What makes this salad interesting is that, unlike most recipes, it actually uses the whole, not just the juice and/or the rind. You peel it like an orange, cut it into little chunks, and toss them with the cooked quinoa, tossed spinach, and dressing. The small bunch of organic spinach we'd shelled out three bucks for at the farmers' market was just enough to make one batch, and we just happened to have all the other ingredients on hand.

As salads go, this one was pretty tasty. The flavors of lemon and spinach play well together, and the juicy lemon chunks, chewy quinoa, and crunchy poppy seeds give it an interesting blend of textures (though those pesky little seeds also have a tendency to stick in your teeth). However, I must admit that even with all that protein-rich quinoa, it wasn't really hearty enough to make a meal of on its own. We ended up supplementing it with some leftover Butternut Squash Pizza with Sage, and the salad plus a slice of that was about the right amount for a satisfying dinner. I imagine this salad would also pair well with any simple protein dish, such as baked chicken or broiled fish. Or maybe you could make a meal out of it just by adding a fairly hearty bread.

So will we be making it again? Well, maybe. The snag is that, as we discovered at the farmers' market, fresh spinach—even in season—can be pretty pricey, and we've never had any luck at growing it ourselves. So although we both liked this salad, we probably didn't like it enough to pony up three bucks for a bunch of spinach just to make it. However, if we happened to buy a fairly big bunch of spinach for another recipe—like the pasta dish, or Spinach with Raisins and Walnuts—and had some left over, a suitably scaled version of this recipe could be a good way to use it up without having to buy any special ingredients.