RICE, BEAN SALAD IS SUPREMELY SATISFYING

Simple version can use up leftovers, adapt to add-ons

When I was young, if my mother said we were having salad, it likely meant a side dish of torn iceberg lettuce leaves and thin wedges of tomatoes, dressed with drizzles of vegetable oil and red wine vinegar and sprinkled with salt and pepper. I remember her making herself tomato and onion or cucumber and onion salads. And we ate potato salad, egg salad and tuna salad, too, but that was about as complex as it got during my formative years.

As time went on, our salads became much more lively affairs as my mother experimented with varied greens and vegetables and so many add-ins, such as crisped bacon, grated or chopped cheeses, sesame sticks and nuts. She got into making fruit salads in the 1970s. The U.S. pasta salad craze of the 1980s looms large in my memory, too. Eventually, sometimes the salad was the whole meal.

Merriam-Webster offers this broad definition of salad: “raw greens (such as lettuce) often combined with other vegetables and toppings and served especially with dressing” and “small pieces of food (such as pasta, meat, fruit, or vegetables) usually mixed with a dressing (such as mayonnaise) or set in gelatin.”

The term salad is applied so liberally that it allows us to turn just about any combination of foods into a salad. (Can a grain bowl also be a salad? Not always, but some definitely qualify.)

One of the things I love about that free-spirited interpretation of what a salad can be is that I often whip up one from what I have on hand. It might have greens. It might not. It might be fruit and nuts. It might be served warm or cold. And, with no boundaries, I’m able to make salads from whatever is in my pantry and refrigerator. Leftovers often find a second life in salads. A few straggler olives (and a splash of the brine from the jar), wilting scallions, pastits-prime parsley with stems and often cabbage, carrots or celery — due to their long shelf life.

That’s what appealed to me about this simple salad from “A New Way to Food” by Maggie Battista. In her cookbook, which describes her journey developing a healthy relationship with

food, she calls the dish Italian-Style Leftover Rice Salad, but I’ve renamed it Rice Salad With Beans, Lemon and Herbs just to make it a little clearer from the get-go what is in it.

Battista makes it with leftover rice. Like her, we often have rice with our meals and so there’s usually leftover rice lingering in the refrigerator or freezer. If you have cooked rice on hand,

she notes that this salad comes together in about 15 minutes.

It calls for mixed young salad greens, and Battista describes it as “immensely satisfying” due to those

greens, the creamy white beans, and the starchy rice.” She sometimes adds canned tuna on top, too.

I couldn’t recall ever making a beans-and-rice salad, but now I know I will

experiment with idea, adding it to my weeknight, leftovers and pantry salad repertoire.