Sweet cherries perk up simple grain salad
Fruit’s texture offers contrast to chewy, crunchy elements
I’m never surprised at how much I love cherries. They’re a summertime favorite, a member of my beloved stone-fruit family. But I tend to eat them out of hand, or perhaps as part of the morning trifecta of yogurt-fruit-granola. Or, of course, baked into a cobbler or pie.
Every now and again, though, I am surprised at just how good they are in a salad: alongside farro and pecans, say, or chopped spinach and goat cheese, where their firm texture either stands up well next to crunchy and chewy things or counterbalances soft ingredients. The salad possibilities can be very simple, too, because the cherries lend some of their juice to the whole affair, eliminating (much the way tomatoes do) the need for a constructed dressing.
It could hardly get much simpler than the brown rice salad I found in “Everyday Vegetarian,” the new cookbook by the editors of Cooking Light (Oxmoor House). The stars of the salad are quartered sweet cherries, mixed into a base of warm, precooked brown rice (from a package if you don’t have any leftover) along with chickpeas, green onions, basil, olive oil, salt and pepper. On top goes a little goat cheese.
Take it to work for lunch, pack it for a picnic side dish or eat it as a light supper, made heartier with the addition of roast vegetables or another (green) salad on the side. This is one of those dishes that’s just as flexible in the eating as it is in the making.